


And this Great Blue World of Ours

by vailkagami



Series: Great Blue World [1]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen, M/M, Multi, No romantic relationships between the main characters, non-consensual sex between Sam and various villains
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-17
Updated: 2012-08-18
Packaged: 2017-11-12 08:52:11
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 20
Words: 246,726
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/489041
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vailkagami/pseuds/vailkagami
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A man wakes up in a ruined wasteland, without memories, without a name, without knowing the strange guy who claims to once have been an angel, or that he once had a little brother. All he knows is that the world is dying, everyone is lying to him, and that somehow, somewhere, something went terribly wrong. Because someone said Yes when they should have said No, and someone else paid the price.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> The idea for this story was born long before season six started, so even though I started writing this for NaNoWriMo in November 2010, when season six was already running, there is one detail in this 'verse that no longer agrees with the canon of the show. It was too essential for the story to change, so I left it.
> 
> The title is taken from the novel _House of Leaves_ by Mark Z. Danielewski. Among other reasons, I chose it thinking of my very first SPN fanfic, [I Wait Now for Only the Wind](http://community.livejournal.com/ohsam/51170.html), because that title was also taken from this novel, and because, believing I would never write this long story anyway, I used some ideas from it for the first one - which is also the explanation for the similarities you will find should you happen to have read that other fic. Apart from that, the stories are not connected in any way.

little solace comes  
to those who grieve  
when thoughts keep drifting  
as walls keep shifting  
and this great blue world of ours  
seems a house of leaves  
moments before the wind

_\- Mark Danielewski; House of Leaves_

 

 

 

 

The dust is the first thing he notices when he opens his eyes – the dust and the colour of the sky. Deep, dirty orange stretches over him, streaked with brown and red, like blood in various stages of drying, and it’s impossible to tell if it’s dusk or dawn. Before this sky, the drifting dust is almost invisible, but he can taste it on his tongue, nearly chokes on it when he takes a deep breath. He hears nothing.

There is no pain when he moves. A part of him is surprised that his joints don’t hurt as he slowly climbs to his feet, but that too is just a thought passing through the back of his mind, as distant as the sky. There is no pain but his body feels heavy and slow, as if he hasn’t moved in a long time. He registers it vaguely like the lack of pain as he looks around as he takes in his surroundings.

The dust is everywhere.

He looks around and thinks that he must be the only person in the world. He stands in a plain made only of dust and earth, moved by the wind and nothing else. There is still no sound; even the air as it brushes by is too weak to speak to him.

Eventually he realises that he is cold. Not freezing, but too cold to be comfortable. He is almost glad – the unpleasant sensation is the only thing in his world that reminds him of life.

In the distance he can see silhouettes, large outlines before the sky. In the dusk he can’t make out more, but he thinks they might be buildings, a city. He doesn’t think he’ll find life there, but for lack of another option, he begins to walk.

 

-

 

As he walks, he becomes aware of more things. Things like the consistency of the ground (oddly soft, like walking over rotten leaves, but hard in places where dust and earth must be hiding stones or ruins), or the clothes he is wearing (jeans, and a leather jacket over a blue shirt over a grey t-shirt, none of which are as dirty as they ought to be), or the fact that the light doesn’t change. He walks for hours without the sky getting any darker or lighter. Eventually he accepts that what he sees is neither dusk nor dawn, it just is.

The clouds of dust change formation. That is all.

After walking for a long time he becomes aware of the pain in his feet that has started to accompany every step, so he sits down to rest. He finds he is thirsty and doesn’t care. When he has rested enough, he walks on. The silhouette of the city in the distance doesn’t come closer.

When he gets tired, he lies on the ground and watches the dust drift across the sky.

 

-

 

The hunger wakes him hours later. He opens his eyes and it feels as if he were waking up from more than just sleep. The cold bites painfully into his bones. His throat is dry and his lips broken and crusted with dirt. He is hungry, and when he finds himself surrounded by the darkness of a starless night he feels both surprise and relief. The world, for some reason, is still turning.

For a moment, when he wandered though the empty, unchanging wasteland without getting anywhere, he wondered if this was hell. Now he knows it isn’t. More, he knows the very thought was ridiculous. He takes a deep breath and tastes the dust on his tongue, the echo of suffering in the emptiness inside him.

The night is short, but the sky never brightens beyond the dull orange of dawn and the temperature doesn’t climb much beyond the chill of night. Moving keeps him warm and if he stays he will die of starvation or thirst, so he walks on, towards the dead city, because it is as good a destination as any.

He doesn’t believe he will find anything when he gets there but shelter, and perhaps food. If he makes it, he might survive. He doesn’t know what for. Perhaps he will find out. Perhaps he is just looking for a better place to die.

By midday he finds a river that has run dry and follows it until he finds rocks where the dust never settled and some water remains. He rests there, quenches his thirst until he can drink no more. With no way of taking some water with him he keeps following the dead river that seems to lead to the dead city, offering water every now and then. The outlines of buildings grow slowly but never gain details.

 

-

 

It takes him two days to reach the first ruined buildings. As he thought, there is nothing there for him to find, just rubble and more dust. He spends a night in the ruins but keeps moving, looking for food, almost mindless with hunger. It seems he wants to survive, yet the thought of never finding another living being fills him with a desperation that is almost crippling.

Three days after waking up nowhere at all, he finds traces of others. Footprints, collections of half-broken tools that are unlikely to have fallen just like this when the world died. Eventually what looks like a fireplace, but it’s old and cold and whoever used it has long since moved on.

The buildings offer shelter, however. Worse than the cold and the wind is the dust that gets into everything and never gets out. There is less of it the deeper he moves into the city, though. He follows the traces of human life, not knowing if they really are what he hopes them to be but clinging to the hope. It leads him, finally, to food: a building, perhaps a store, that mostly survived, and cans of food with no expiration date, not good but edible. After three days of eating only dust and dirt they are the best thing he can imagine ever having eaten.

A little girl finds him between the cans later, and it occurs to him that it was no coincidence they were piled up here, that he’s sitting in someone’s storage. Figures. The girl stares at him and asks who he is.

“I have no idea,” he tells her. “Don’t even know my name. What’s yours?”

“Jena,” she tells him, comes closer. “Why don’t you remember?”

“I don’t know. Just woke up like this. You’re the first person I met so far. Are there others?”

She nods. “You know nothing at all?”

“I know I’m hungry.” For days, this was the feeling that defined him. “Sorry I ate your food.” He’s still eating her food; he can’t seem to stop.

Jena only shrugs. “There’s enough. There aren’t many to eat it.”

 

-

 

After she filled the bag she carried with cans, the little girl takes him and the food to where the others are. As he follows her through the destroyed streets in the fading, dirty light, he notices that she isn’t so little after all; just thin and dirty, and too trusting for a grown up in a world that looks like this. There is something almost disturbingly innocent about her as she takes the stranger she only met to the place where the rest of humanity is in hiding. She wanders though the ruins without shoes and calls him Mickey.

He grimaces at that. “That’s not my name.” But she only shrugs like she doesn’t care. “It is now. How can you even tell it wasn’t before?”

He doesn’t know; he just knows, the way he knows without looking for it that she avoids the larger streets and doesn’t take the straight route home.

She doesn’t carry a weapon, only the bag of cans.

 

-

 

When they reach her home, he finds out just how special Jena is. Special for trusting him. Special for not carrying a weapon. He really shouldn’t be surprised to find a dozen knives, spears, and even a pistol pointed at his face. Actually, he finds he isn’t surprised at all.

“That’s Mickey,” Jena introduces him. “I found him in the store. He was hungry.”

“My name’s not Mickey,” he tells them. They don’t seem to care, and Jena moves on without looking back to take her cans to a largely intact building without ever stopping. He doesn’t see her again for hours, while the others cut his arm with a blade that seems to be special and force him to eat salt and drink the water they hand him. He accepts it gratefully – he’s thirsty and the salt has made it worse. After he emptied the entire bottle, they seem to relax a little more, but while the weapons are lowered, they aren’t put away.

They take him to the house Jena disappeared into. From the outside he sees light fall through the gabs between the wooden planks nailed to the glassless windows and once inside he sees that the rooms are lit by torches. For some reason he expected electricity, but he can’t even remember how he knows what electricity _is_.

All the tests they put him through on the outside they repeat in front of some people who look like they’re important or have others convinced they are. He bears them patiently, and this time he has a chance to get a better look at the knife that cuts him yet again. It is silver – an object of unexpected value in this crumbled wasteland, and something inside him finds something else the moment Jena speaks from the doorway.

“Oh, come on, guys,” she says, sounding bored. “We walked over three devil’s traps on the way here. How much proof do you need?”

“There’s other evil things but demons out there, Jena,” one of the old men (who perhaps aren’t as old as his perception tries to make them) tells her with a kind of long suffering patience that reminds him of something.

“You’re not going to find out if I’m one of them by testing me only for demon,” he points out, which makes Jena giggle – a strange, explosive sound that doesn’t fit but startles no one.

“You shouldn’t have brought him here,” the old one tells her.

She shrugs, as she does when she doesn’t really care. “I did. What’re you gonna do about it?”

Not much, as it turns out. He is questioned about his identity and his intent and can only tell them he has neither. They don’t trust him, but don’t seem willing to kill him either. Humans, that much he understands, are rare. If they find one, they keep them. In his case they keep him locked up, just in case.

Jena gets bored through his interrogation and leaves again. He tries to do some interrogation of his own, but no one has any answers to his questions but incredulous stares. When a man with a knife and a woman with a longer knife escort him to his room, he tries again. What happened to the city, he wants to know. Are there other groups of survivors around? What is out in the ruins that they fear so much? Who are they anyway?

They just shake their heads at him as if they can’t believe he doesn’t know. Like anyone would react when facing someone who doesn’t get why the sky is blue. Except they sky isn’t blue and he doesn’t know why he thinks it should be.

“Is the sky ever blue during the day?” he asks when they turn to leave him alone, and the woman snorts in response.

“Stop being silly,” she tells him. “The sky hasn’t been blue in at least two hundred years.”

 

-

 

The room they locked him in is small, but not uncomfortable. The torches lightening it provide a warmth he hasn’t felt ever since he woke up, and there’s a rug on the floor to sleep on, and a bottle filled with clean water. The closet beside the locked door is empty and the mirror above the rug is cracked but still good enough. He stands before it for a long time, taking in his appearance. It hadn’t occurred to him before he saw it that he didn’t even know what he looked like.

The man staring back at him needs to shave, but he finds that he is obviously quite good looking. Green eyes with long lashes meet his gaze and under his dirty clothes he is well built and tall. After taking off his shirt, he finds a tattoo on his chest that fascinates him, even if he doesn’t know what it means.

“Is the sky blue. That was a good one.”

Jena’s voice comes through the door. He imagines her sitting on the other side, bare feet pulled close to hide under the rim of her dress.

“Good enough to pass it on, it seems,” he notes.

“Billy thought it was pretty funny. But then, he doesn’t really believe the sky ever was blue in the first place.”

“And you do?”

“Of course.”

“How would you know that?”

“How would you?”

“I have no idea. Just seemed right. You?”

“Saw the pictures, of course.” She giggles, but it doesn’t sound like a little girl. It just sounds slightly insane.

He has to admit, he hasn’t really considered the possibility of pictures existing to tell of a less broken world. “Then how come Billy doesn’t believe?”

“Could be fakes. It’s not so much that he doesn’t believe, more that he doesn’t care. ‘T was long ago, you know. Doesn’t really matter, does it?”

He supposes it doesn’t. “You don’t think I made this all up? That I can’t remember anything?”

He can almost see her shrug behind the door. “Who would make up something like that? I guess maybe you were just lucky. I mean, there’s not much here worth remembering.”

“I’d still like to know more. Would you at least tell me? What happened? Where are we? What’s going on?”

She sighs. “’S kinda a boring story. Sure you wanna hear it?”

“How can the end of the world be boring?”

“Oh, the world hasn’t ended. We’re still here.” Again that weird, disconcerting giggle. “It’s just become boring. And empty.”

“Then tell me how. I don’t have any other plans for the evening.” He half expects her to giggle again. Instead he hears the shuffling of her dress as she moves and when she speaks again, her voice sounds even closer to the thin wood of the door.

“Then listen closely, Mickey. I’m not a patient storyteller.”

He doesn’t correct her for the name, for once letting it go by uncommented, surprised and slightly taken aback by the sudden gravity of her voice. He sits on the floor as well, not a two feet from the door, and imagines her kneeling on the other side, her palms and forehead pressed to the wood as she speaks.

“It’s the apocalypse,” she says. “Plain and simple. Angels and demons got fed up with this world and humanity and decided to have a little spring cleaning. You see the result.” He wants to ask, wants to know why the back of his mind seems to be itching, but keeps quiet until she continues. “It started centuries ago, in the year 2010, or so they say. We don’t even know how long ago that was. We have numbers, but they don’t really count. I think we lost a few years since then.”

 _How do you lose a year_ , he wants to ask, incredulous, but he doesn’t. How do you lose the sun, the sky?

“The Archangels descended from heaven and the devil walked the world with an army of demons in his wake. Their battles levelled cities, disturbed and summoned spirits and monsters. What remained of the human civilisation didn’t have a lot left to live on.”

“I don’t understand.” It feels wrong to interrupt her; like blasphemy somehow, but he can’t stop himself. “I thought the angels were supposed to protect humanity.”

She laughs at that, sudden and quick. It’s not her usual giggle, inappropriate and slightly insane, but the harsh, bitter laugh of an adult, and for the first time it makes him shiver. “Humanity was collateral damage. It wasn’t even that most of them wanted it gone. This wasn’t ever about humanity. It’s just that no one gives a fuck about you.”

He’s silent after that, swallowing the information and digesting it on his own. He doesn’t know why this feels so _wrong_.

“No one’s looked at angels as something to be worshipped for ages,” Jena says as if she’s reading his mind. “Something to be feared, yes. And some people still hope for mercy to come to them when this is all over. Me, I very much doubt that.” She laughs again, with more humour this time. “Some even cling to Lucifer and serve his demons willingly, hoping to be spared when they win. A bit silly, really, but souls are the big thing these days. If you want to sell yours, you’ll find a demon to take it for sure, and then you’ll get a place among their ranks, eventually. You know how that works. And the prize you get in return is pretty much never worth it. But they never get it. This is so close to hell already, how can the pit be so much worse, they think. Idiots, right? I wish I could be there to see their faces when they find out what hell really has in store for them. No, you should rather sell your soul to an angel. At least like that you’re guaranteed to go to heaven.” She spits that word out like it’s disgusting, and adds, “Eventually.”

“You can sell your soul to an angel?” The idea seems ridiculous somehow, like this isn’t how it’s supposed to work.

“You can sell your soul to anything that’ll have it. Your body, too, if an angel wants it. And, oh, right.” She pauses, as if she just remembered. “Someone sold the world.”

“The world? Selling your body? What, angels work as heavenly pimps now?”

“Some. Angels need bodies to run around here. Need human suits to destroy humanity, imagine that. I knew some guys once who actually appreciated the irony. Anyway, they need permission to take a body. Which brings us to selling your body. And, obviously, the world.”

“So, some people allowed the angels to take over and wreck havoc on their own people?”

“Some people, yeah. One in particular, if the stories are to be believed.” He heard her yawn, sounding as if she was bored rather than tired. “There you are, sounding all surprised as if you didn’t already know that.”

He nods slowly. “I guess I might have. But it’s like I didn’t know I knew before I heard you say it.”

“Funny. Anything else coming back?”

He listens to the emptiness inside him. “No, nothing.”

“Too bad.” Jena doesn’t sound like she actually cares. He waits for her to say more, but there’s only silence, and when he says her name a minute later he finds that she has already left him.

 

-

 

He thinks he dreams that night, but can’t remember when he wakes up in the morning.

Someone brings him a bucket of water to wash himself with and clean clothes. He shaves with the blade they give him, watches the face in the mirror again. Early thirties, he assumes. No notable scars on his face. His hair is dark blond and cut short. None of the men and women he’d seen yesterday had hair that didn’t at least reach their shoulders.

He switches his dirty jeans for soft pants made of plain cloth and his shirts for a shirt of the same fabric, but keeps on his leather jacket when they lead him outside, even though inside the community it isn’t as cold as in the dusty wasteland.

The gloom that passes for daylight doesn’t allow him to see very far, but what he sees of the streets is free of rubble and the buildings seem to be stable and remotely well kept. This is a long standing settlement, he can tell, and it’s much larger than he originally thought. These people have probably lived here for generations.

There aren’t many people around, but those he sees – passing him curious, mistrusting glances as they pass – seem to be going through their usual activities, and only two or three are openly carrying weapons. Their clothes are simple, often old and more or less expertly mended, but they don’t look like the half-barbaric scavengers he expected when he first saw Jena hunting the ruins for food. Unlike her, they are all wearing shoes.

He is brought back to the building he’s been in the day before and they sit him down with the men that are maybe old and maybe not and give him breakfast. They still don’t trust him, but the dogs that sit between them do and that seems to relax them. He wonders if they are special dogs somehow, trained for finding humans-that-aren’t. Wonders if they could smell an angel.

He thanks the men for the breakfast – it seems the polite thing to do – but the one sitting closest to him waves his words away when he mentions how scarce their resources have to be.

“We have enough food and not enough people to eat it. The city had so much, it left plenty even after so many years. And we make our own. Don’t worry about it.”

He can’t help but wonder what kind of food they produce, because he sure as hell hasn’t seen any fields or gardens around here. Before he can wonder too much about what sort of meat exactly he’s eating, he asks about Jena, going deep into the ruins for some cans of compressed whatever.

“That’s just her,” the old man says. In his case he is certain he really is old – ancient in fact. “She plays her games out there. Has her own storages. I guess our food is too boring for her.”

“Isn’t anyone worried about her? I mean, no one’s given me any details, but it seems to me that there’s a lot of ugly stuff out there that could eat her.”

“It’s not like we encourage it. She just goes, and so far she’s always returned.”

“And now she’s brought you along.” The new voice belongs to a woman, possibly even older than ancient, who eyes him sharply. “Perhaps there is a reason for her being like that.”

He stares at her – not because she’s interesting to look at, but because she’s staring at him and that’s kind of irritating. “What, you think I’m some kind of messiah to save you from this mess and get back the sun?”

Her expression doesn’t change. “No. You are a poor, lost boy who doesn’t know anything and would have died out there without her.”

He can’t even argue against that.

 

-

 

He gets a tour of the place later. Bill and Minny accompany him again, but this time they speak more and answer a few questions. They have questions of their own: Where he comes from (the wasteland), why he came here (nowhere else to go), what he’s planning to do (no idea yet, but open to suggestions). They ask if he’s planning to stay. (No.) He doesn’t answer that question, looks at the streets and the people instead. They don’t look starving or wild, but most of them have the firm, muscled bodies that tell of a life of physical hardship and in their faces he can see a constant tension. They may not have been reduced to animals by the downfall of civilisation, but they are used to danger and resigned to loss.

He wonders where he’s seen that expression before. In the faces of the people he lived with, he assumes, because he must have lived in a community like this before. It doesn’t bring anything back, though.

“How do you keep this place safe?” he asks. There are too many streets going in and out. Guard are posted, but they can’t watch everything, not in a place this big.

“Protective sigils. Devil’s traps.” Minny shrugs like that’s obvious, like he’s supposed to know what that means, and he does. “Lots and lots of salt and iron.”

“Are all settlements like this? Are there even others?” He doesn’t want to believe that these people are all that remains of humanity.

“Some. Two more in this city that I know of. We do some trading, but usually we keep to ourselves.”

“You should go there,” Bill says. “Maybe someone knows you around there.” Or maybe he would get eaten on the way. He suspects Bill doesn’t really care, as long as he leaves.

Some people here seem almost glad he came, because they are few and more die than are born. This place is dying. Their whole race is dying. But for the same reason, most don’t trust him. He can’t say he blames them.

 

-

 

Eventually they let him move around on his own, but he notices the half-hidden stares wherever he goes. They try to pretend they’re not watching his every move and failing rather badly. When he explores a narrow alley he knows he’s being followed, and when the follower doesn’t enter after him he knows it’s a dead end.

Jena is sitting on a stone bench at the back wall, looking as if she’s been waiting for him. She’s chewing on something he can’t identify, swallows and tears the next bit off the long, brownish bar rather inelegantly. “They won’t let you go,” she says conversationally.

His eyes narrow at the blunt statement. “I kinda figured that, with me knowing how to find this place and all.”

“Yeah. Most things out there know anyway, otherwise we wouldn’t need the sigils, but you know. Paranoid and all.” She chews while she’s talking, and somehow he falls oddly relieved to see her eat at all. He might not know much about demons or angels, but as far as he can tell they don’t eat. “You know, Melissa thinks God send me out to find you. It’s cute.”

“Melissa?”

“Our mama. The old lady you met at breakfast. She likes you, because of this God thing. Thinks it’s our job to take you in. She’s like that.”

For the first time he is genuinely surprised. “I didn’t think anyone would be like that.”

“It’s funny, I know. Guess it has something to do with desperation. They need to believe that someone is still on their side, that their souls can be saved, yadda, yadda.” She waves any further speculation in that direction away with a gratuitous gesture of her hand. “Angels aren’t really associated with God anymore. Although some still believe in them, too. Throw themselves right at them and trust that whatever they do is for the best. Idiots. Better go to the demons. At least there you get some immediate results before they come to collect your soul. With God and angels it’s all about faith. Base your life on the hope that perhaps someone will save you, but never get proof.” She stuffed the rest of her bar in her mouth. “Sucks.”

“I take it you don’t believe in God then?”

“Depends on how you define ‘believe’. I have no faith, if that’s what you mean. God’s a dick. Doesn’t give a shit. Moved on and found another project to dedicate his time to. We’re yesterday’s toys.” Jena speaks lightly around the food in her mouth. “You don’t believe either. In anyone.”

He hesitates for a second, listens inside him for any echo of faith, but only finds crippling sadness he doesn’t want to explore. “Guess I don’t.”

“Of course not.” She stuffs her hand in the pocket of her dress and pulls a face when it comes up empty. “What would an angel – or a demon – have to offer you for your soul?”

“I’m keeping my soul, thank you very much.” His eyes narrow. “Why, are you offering?”

She giggles into her fist. “Have nothing to offer. I’m just me.” She doesn’t seem surprised by the question, though. “Wouldn’t want your soul anyway.”

“Well, not sure what it’s worth,” he admits. “You know, with the memory loss and all.”

Her large eyes bore into his. “You really remember nothing, do you?”

“Nothing at all.” Except that’s not quite true. He knows things. Elemental things, like words, places, the purpose of objects. But what he knows doesn’t always go along with what he sees. He knows the sky should be blue but it isn’t. He knows the world should be whole but it isn’t. He remembers cars that drive down the street, but for the reaction he provoked when he mentioned them his mind might as well have made them up.

He’s desperate for answers, but not as much as he feels he should be. The emptiness inside him doesn’t frighten and confuse him. He just accepts it, reluctant to explore beyond the rim.

Perhaps because he knows his memories are not lost. They are still there, inaccessible. Lurking.

Not knowing who he was, what had happened to him, why he is here where everything feels so wrong is slowly driving him crazy, but sneakily so, without him really noticing. For a second he wants to scream and punch the wall in frustration and sudden, nameless fear, then his thoughts slide away and he is glad to turn his back on the sensation. All that remains is the slight frustration of knowing that like this he is going nowhere.

Jena looks at him, her face empty. When she speaks, her voice is calmer and quieter than ever before. “Perhaps you already sold your soul to somebody or something. Perhaps you sold your body, or your memories. Who knows – perhaps one day this’ll all finally be over and when you get wherever you’re headed everything will make sense.”

“If so, I hope it was worth it.”

“It never is.”

“When this’ll finally be over?” he echoes somewhat belatedly. “You keep saying things like that as if it wasn’t already over.”

“Well, it isn’t.” She grins quickly, another person from one moment to the next. “Oh, come on, Mickey! You gotta know this! No? Really? Well, the demons and angels wouldn’t still be around if it wasn’t over, would they? Like I said, this isn’t about humanity. They fight for their own purposes, and before they haven’t gotten what they wanted, this isn’t going to end. When they do, it depends on who wins if the rest of us are going to be wiped out in one go or left to die slowly in our own pace. If any human makes it through the final battle, that is.”

“What are their purposes?”

A shrug. “Depends. The angels want to be rid of humanity because it’s a mess. The demons want to be rid of humanity and get as many as them into hell to strengthen their numbers and have Earth as their own personal playground.

“I thought you said it wasn’t about humanity.”

“It isn’t. When I say the angels and the demons, I mean some angels and demons. Most of them, true, but not the ones in charge. In the end, this is about two angels on an ego trip wanting to fight each other, and that’s what it comes down to, really. Everything else doesn’t matter. Just them and their private little war, and the Earth gets levelled as an afterthought.”

“Two angels? I thought this was between heaven and hell?”

Jena rolls her eyes. “Lucifer’s an angel too, Mickey.”

Ah. Of course. He knew that, he realises, and something clenches and tears inside him. For a moment he feels sick, like he’s going to throw up.

“How long have they been fighting?”

“They haven’t been fighting at all. Just threw their armies at each other to kill time until they can.”

“And why can’t they?”

“You remember me telling you that some people sell their bodies to angels because angels need human bodies to act on this plane?” He nods, somehow knowing his nausea isn’t going to go away anytime soon. “That’s why. Unlike demons, they can’t take just anyone, the body and the original soul have to be compatible with the angel taking over. The more powerful the angel, the fewer potential hosts. In the case of Michael and Lucy, the number of vessels is extremely limited. They can’t have their epic, apocalyptic showdown because one of them hasn’t gotten his vessel to let him in yet.”

“You said they needed permission,” he mumbles. Takes a deep breath and clenches his hands for no reason. “So all you need for all this to be over is some guy saying Yes?”

“Pretty much. The big bang, and everyone will be toast. That little word is all that stands between us and total annihilation.” She licks her fingers clear of the remains of her sticky bar. “About time, if you ask me.”

“Not a big fan of humanity either, I gather,” he notes drily. She grins at him.

“Love humanity. ‘T was nice while it lasted.” Before he can comment on that, she runs down the street and out of sight and he is left in the alley, alone. After taking a deep breath, he walks over to a pile of stones that fell of the back wall, crouches down and vomits between the cracks.

When he is done he sits down on the bench Jena has vacated and looks up to the sky. There is more dust in the air than in the days before, but it is high above him, drifting across the firmament like clouds.

He’s going to leave here, soon. Maybe tonight. Jena is right – they won’t let him go. He wouldn’t let himself go either if he was in their place. But if he was in their place, he would never have let him out of the locked room in the first place. Or shot him the moment he arrived. He is certain of that.

That just appears to be the person he is. He really has no reason to complain about them being careful.

That doesn’t mean he’s going to sit here and wait until he’s won their trust. He still doesn’t know what he’s hoping to find, but he isn’t going to find it here.

 

-

 

Getting out isn’t going to be too hard. He has guards, but they pretend not to guard him and will be easy to lose. There are guards on the exits to the small town-within-a-city, but there are too many other places through which he can leave. His main concern is that these people know the place – hell, probably the entire ruined city – and he doesn’t. But it’s vast. He’ll be able to hide and get away.

Of course, if they catch him, they’re going to kill him on principle. He’s pretty sure about that.

Bill comes up to him in the evening, when the dirty orange of the sky turns to brown and red. Offers to show him to his room and he goes willingly. Whatever lock they put on the door, it won’t be a challenge to him. Their protection seems to be mainly about the supernatural beings that wouldn’t be impressed by locks anyway.

“So, Jena told me a little about the war, and Michael and Lucifer and all that,” he says as they walk through the streets. “Sounds epic.”

Bill visibly flinches at his words. “We don’t mention that name. Ever.”

“What name? Lucifer?”

Bill flinches again, which is answer enough.

“Why not? You think he’s going to show up here if you call him three times?”

That gets him a glare of the darkest variety. He’s probably hit the nail on the head. Superstition is such a powerful force.

Although, who knows? Perhaps it is true. Speak of the devil…

Though he can’t imagine what the devil could possibly want here.

“Michael will beat the evil one in the final battle and bring paradise to this Earth. We’ll all be saved then. Even you, if you learn when not to speak.”

He frowns a little at that. “I thought the final battle would toast what’s left of this planet, given they all find a fitting vessel to fight with in the first place.”

Bill stares at him, blankly despite the frown on his face.

“Or not?” he asks, suddenly insecure. “Jena mentioned something like that.”

At that, Bill snorts. “Jena mentions a lot if you let her. It’s just one of her stories. If you want a history teacher, ask someone else. Angels are angels. It’s the demons that steal bodies and souls.”

He doesn’t say anything to that, feeling silly and frustrated. Of course Jena has made things up. Because she is obviously quite crazy. But it felt so right when she told him, like confirming something he already knew. He doesn’t get the same feeling from Bill’s words – they’re just information.

Though perhaps more reliable information. At least with Bill he feels like speaking to a person. Not an overly sympathetic person, but someone real. Someone who feels human and doesn’t seem to read his mind.

“You have sigils to protect you from demons and other things,” he says when they reach the house. “Are there ways to keep angels out as well?”

Bill just snorts like it’s the most ridiculous thought ever. “Why would we want to?”

“Uhm, Lucifer?” he suggests, and it’s worth the glare he receives just to see Bill flinch.

After a moment of silence, his guide admits, “We use sigils to keep out angels. _All_ angels.” Bill sounds like this fact bothers him. A believer, then. In what, he can’t tell, due to everyone apparently telling him some kind of bullshit.

But they keep out angels as well and demons and all other kind of things that aren’t human, which means Jena is human but doesn’t mean she’s normal. A person can be completely human and still have freaky powers like visions of the future and bending spoons and killing demons with their mind…

They let him stay in the same room he’s had the night before. There even are fresh clothes for him, and his old ones are gone. He’s not really surprised about that – even in the state they’re in his jeans are ten times better than what these people are wearing – but he’s somewhat pissed none the less. At least he didn’t give them a chance to steal his jacket.

There’s food, too, and he packs it in a bag he makes out of the thin blanket on the bed, along with the spare clothes and the bottle of water. Sitting in front of the door he waits until everything goes quiet outside and then some more. When he tests the lock, he finds they never even bothered to lock him in.

In a way it makes sense. Why would he want to leave? It’s cold outside, and there’s nowhere to go – and there’s a guard out in the corridor. An armed guard, of course.

A guard who’s totally not going to be a problem.

The guard isn’t even facing him. He’s reading, clearly not expecting any trouble, and looks up startled when the door closes with a loud snap.

The prisoner who pretends not to know that he is a prisoner approaches him openly. “Hey,” he says in greeting. “Can you help me? I was wondering-” He ends his sentence with a fist to the face that would have taken the guard out neatly had the guard not ducked and dodged his blow. Despite his own surprise he finds himself aiming another blow to the man’s neck and this time it works. The guard goes down and the man he should have been guarding stands over him, his heart beating wild with adrenalin and something else.

This could have gone terribly wrong. He has been saved only by instincts he didn’t know he has, because he made the mistake of assuming his opponent was an incompetent idiot. He doesn’t know much about himself, but now learns that he hates it when that happens.

Unfortunately, he doesn’t learn anything from it. Security is so loose here that he is convinced this was the only guard posted for him. He is careful when he sneaks through the house towards the exit, but not careful enough. Later he doesn’t know what annoys him more: that he didn’t expect the other three guards waiting at the only door, or that he never gets the chance to prove that despite not expecting them he would totally have kicked their asses.

As things are, someone kicked their asses before him. That someone is grouching between the three fallen men and grins up at him. In the end he isn’t even surprised.

“Your timing is flawless,” Jena tells him. “I was just done here.”

“I could have done that,” he makes clear.

“No, you couldn’t. Let’s go.” She stands and he sees the blood on her hand as she carelessly wipes it on her dress. He looks at the fallen men again and sees the blood on the floor.

“You killed them.” He doesn’t even sound shocked; this is too absurd to wrap his mind around. Even he only tied up and gagged the guard he took out, and he didn’t know the man. Jena grew up with these people. But she only shrugs.

“Not all of them. We should really go now.” She hurries away, into the darkness of the empty streets, and he has no chance but to follow, knowing that when the bodies are found, there is no doubt who will be accused of the murders. He wonders if that was Jena’s motivation.

“Why did you do that?” he asks breathlessly, when she stops before a wall and he stops a few metres from her, out of reach.

She doesn’t answer, just flashes him a grin and climbs onto a windowsill, onto some metal pipes and then over the wall that blocked her way. He follows, his muscles remembering the necessary movements even if he doesn’t, and finds her standing in another alley. On the ground beneath her is a faintly glowing symbol he recognizes as a devil’s trap. The moment he hits the ground she turns and runs on, leaving the symbol behind.

“Hurry, Mickey,” she calls, giggles, and disappears between ruins. He hesitates, wondering if he should follow her or run as fast as he can in the opposite direction. He does follow her, figuring as close to the heart of the community and the dead bodies she left behind he’s going to be better off with her to throw at their pursuers should they get them, rather than alone in a labyrinth everyone knows but him. He picks up a pipe, however, one end broken and jagged, and holds it tight in his hands.

She’s waiting for him again, at the next junction, and for a while they run silently. Eventually she sits down on the ground as it she just decided that this is the perfect moment for a break. He remains standing in some distance, listens into the quiet of the night.

The sky never gets completely black. It remains a dark grey at any time of night, and he is glad for that, as it lets him make out just enough to move around without running into walls. Star- and moonless as it is, a black sky would mean complete darkness in this powerless corpse of a city, this eternal black-out.

“The walls of the buildings are littered with Enochian symbols,” she says suddenly, casually, as if just picking up a conversation they had before.

He doesn’t take his eyes off her. “I don’t see any symbols.”

“That’s because they’re invisible,” she explains knowingly. “To human eyes.”

“Then why do you know they’re here?”

“Because everyone knows it. I was here when they made new ones. Made a few on my own. That there, for example.” She points at an empty spot of wall and giggles.

“Enochian symbols are meant to keep out angels,” he guesses.

“Knew you’d remember, Mickey.”

“You really creep me out, you know?”

“Counting on it. I like your pipe. You might wanna hang on to it until you find something better.” She gets to her feet and stretches. “Ready to move on? Doesn’t seem like anyone’s headed our way yet, but you shouldn’t stick around here for too long.” She moves on before he can point out to her that she was the one who killed people and turned his harmless little escape into a life-threatening one. But instead of running like before, she walks slowly, humming softly under her breath as if she were completely insane.

“How do you know about all this stuff? How to ward of demons and angels and ghosts and all that? Doesn’t seem like a common thing to know.”

“It is, now. You know it or you’re dead. Most are dead. The rest of us, we have the stories, and the books. You want to survive, you should read the records of Saint Bobby. But I guess you don’t have to, do you?”

“ _Saint Bobby_?” His voice raises a pitch in his disbelief. “Saint _Bobby_? Seriously?”

She eyes him expectantly, a small smile playing on her lips.

“What an idiotic name for a saint,” he states. Jena raises her eyebrows, grimaces and shrugs with one shoulder as she turns away to concentrate on the way rather than him.

“S’pose so. Well, we can’t choose our saints or angels. Have to take what we’re handed, even if they have silly names.”

“Billy told me about Michael,” he says, since they were back to angels already. Rubs his hands because it’s cold but doesn’t let go of the pipe. “He seems pretty sure that the guy is the best thing that can possibly happen to mankind, and that angels in general are awesome. Except for the obvious exception, of course.”

“Like I said, idiots.” She doesn’t seem to care about being accused of lying.

“Or you making shit up. Human vessels and all that. Knew there was something fishy about that.”

“No, you didn’t. You believed it, because you knew it’s true, and you still do.”

He gives up his safety-distance and grabs her arm, pulls her around to face him. “Who are you?” he asks angrily.

She rolls her eyes. “I’m Jena. Hello. You are Mickey.”

“No, I’m not.”

“Prove it, Mickey.” She laughs, uncomfortably, dangerously loud.

“I don’t know much about myself, but I’m pretty sure my name isn’t Mickey.”

“You’re sure? How can you be sure? How can you be sure of anything, you poor little lost boy?”

He drops his hand, steps back. “It doesn’t feel right,” he realises.

“So? Interesting. Any clue what would be better? Daniel, perhaps? Carl? Adam? Norbert?”

“No,” he hisses, suddenly wishing they would just move on and get away from here so that he can get away from _her_ , even if he has to stab her and leave her corpse between the rubble.

“Larry?” she goes on. “James? Bob?”

“I really don’t think it’s going to work that way.”

“Eric? Albert? Sa-”

“Shut up!” he snaps. “What the hell are you doing here anyway? Why tell me all this if you refuse to be of any actual help? Why are you helping me here? If you want me to get killed, you could have found better ways.”

“Right. Might not want you killed then.” Her eyes are large and innocent in the first faint glimmer of the breaking dawn and he just wants to stab her. “I just want to help you get away from here.”

He grinds his teeth. “Why?”

“Because I want you to be elsewhere,” she says lightly. “Look, over there? That building with the two tops?”

It’s hard to overlook. The outline of a skyscraper in the far distance, climbing the sky in two steps. Still upright in the devastation around, it dominates the skyline.

“Don’t go there,” she tells him. “That’s where they’ll look. It’s kinda hard not to be drawn to it. Go in the opposite direction for about two days, keep your back always to it. You’ll find another place like this, just smaller and more dangerous. Don’t fuck with the people, but if they don’t kill you, you might find answers there. Good luck.”

He realises he’s being send away and suddenly feel unsure. All he has to go by is the word of an unstable girl who’s at best batshit crazy and at worst not human and possibly responsible for the mess he’s in. Right now, she smiles at him. “Go on,” she says. “They’ll get here eventually, and of course I’ll tell them it was you who killed Mark and Harry. Don’t let them catch you.”

He considers killing her, just for the sake of it. The only reason he doesn’t is that he’s sure it won’t work. She’ll probably kill him instead. Or just laugh.

Or laugh, and then cripple him and leave him to die here or be found and executed. She seems like the type.

“You’ll forgive me if I don’t really trust you,” he says, even as he turns his back to the skyscraper.

“Ask about Castiel, when you can,” she suggests. “Some stories about him might actually be useful to you.”

“Oh, freaking fantastic!” he bust out. “And why exactly, with all the bullshit you gave me, didn’t you think of telling me the stories that might really help me?”

“Because I don’t like him. He’s an annoying pain. See you, Mick.” She hops down the broken wall she’s been sitting on and is out of sight in a second. For a moment he considers following her, demanding answers. In the end he just walks, climbs through ruins. When he reaches a clear enough street, he runs until there is no breath left in his lungs.

 

-

 

He needs three days to get anywhere. Jena’s description of the way was vague, to say the least, and he spends far more time hiding in the shells of crumbling buildings than he probably has to, holding his breath until he sees a boar or some other animal scuffle by on the outside. Never humans. Never the ones intending to kill him for Jena’s murders.

They probably never even come close, and that’s damn lucky, because the nightmares start the first night after leaving and he’s pretty sure he wakes up screaming. When he comes awake, his heart is beating wildly, his face is wet with tears and sweat and he has no idea what he dreamed about. One time he wakes up and hates himself so much he throws up.

He doesn’t know how to approach this other community when he finds it. ‘Hi, I lost my memory, please tell me about a guy called Cas-something-or-other’ probably isn’t going to go down too well. He’s pretty sure he’s heading for a community of hunters, and hunters have a tendency of shooting before asking, especially in a world like this. They’ll kill him just because they don’t know him. Somehow, he’s sure that telling them Jena sent him isn’t going to be such a brilliant idea either.

He spends a few hours of his wandering wondering – but not too intently – how he knows what a hunter is when no one’s ever mentioned the word to him.

He finds water when his runs out. He might be able to hunt one of the animals living in the ruins if his food ran out as well, but he doesn’t eat much, finds himself in a body well able to handle hunger. He walks, and his feet hurt, and his clothes are too thin for the night except for the leather jacket which is freaking awesome.

On the morning of the third day, he finds another human being – or rather, another human being finds him. He’s in the process of filling up his water bottle in a small creek when instinct makes him turn around and come face to face with another man. The guy is standing so close to him he jumps back in reflex, cursing and soaking one leg of his trousers in the icy water of the creek. The man watches with an expression that is at the same time blank and horribly intense. He feels naked.

He also feels alive. Somehow, this guy sneaked up on his without any sound at all – and damn if that isn’t creepy as hell! – and then he didn’t kill him from behind. The stranger doesn’t even look surprised to see him, just stares at him with eyes that are stunningly blue in the first dirty light of the day, and the words that come out of his mouth aren’t a question.

It’s, “You’re Dean.”

And damn if that doesn’t feel right.


	2. Chapter 2

The blue-eyed stranger doesn’t move at all, just stands there staring at him, a light frown on his features. The man who’s pretty sure his name actually _is_ Dean holds the broken pipe a little tighter and stares back.

“Who are you?” he asks. The other blinks at him, his frown deepening for a second.

“My name is Castiel,” he finally introduces himself. “I used to be an angel of the Lord.” And will you look at that!

“Castiel?” Dean repeats. “The one Jena mentioned?”

Castiel, who doesn’t look angelic by any definition of the word, tilts his head. “I do not know who Jena is.”

“Don’t you? Crazy chick, slightly homicidal, obviously not demon or angel but pretty certainly not normal. Never heard of her? She said I should ask about you.”

“I have avoided interaction with other beings to the best of my abilities for a while. I am currently not familiar with any homicidal chicks.”

Dean blinks, takes another step back so his right foot is no longer standing in the creek. The whole conversation feels surreal to him, even weirder than talking to Jena has been. He feels like he’s walking through one long nightmare.

“You do not know me,” Castiel observes, making him laugh.

“Dude, I don’t even know myself.” The man’s earlier words finally catch up with him. “Wait. You ‘used to be’ an angel of the Lord? How do you stop being an angel?” Another thought strikes him. “Is this one of those vessel things? You used to house an angel and it’s gone?”

Some tension seems to flow from Castiel’s body as he sighs. “This vessel is still occupied. The man this body originally belonged to was called Jimmy Novak. I am Castiel.”

“And you used to be an angel.”

“Yes.”

“And now you’re not.”

“Yes.”

“What, you lost your licence or something?”

“I fell.”

“Huh.” Dean falls silent, somehow convinced this isn’t how this conversation is supposed to go.

“You don’t need that,” Castiel says, his voice softer than before as he looks at the improvised weapon in Dean’s hands. Dean doesn’t let it go, but he lowers it a bit.

“How do you know my name?” he asks, finally getting his priories in order. “ _I_ didn’t know my name.”

Castiel nods slowly. “I feared as much when I followed your trail. The people I spoke to said you knew nothing.”

“The people you spoke to?”

“In the community you stayed at. They are looking for you. For other reasons than I do.”

“I can imagine.” The sky brightens slowly, turning Castiel to a dark outline before the invisible sunrise. “For the record, it was Jena who killed those men, not me.”

“There was no person called Jena around when I was at that place.”

“Huh. Figures.” He wonders if she was a ghost or something, but all the salt and iron would have kept her away then. “Why were you looking for me? Who _am_ I?”

Castiel turns away, walks over to a broken wall and sits down on it with weary movements. He looks tired, suddenly. “You and I, we used to be friends. When word reached me of your return, I came to find you."

So. This is going somewhere at least. Unfortunately, Castiel is slightly creepy as well and Dean has no reason to trust him any more than Jena.

Who seems to have been right about the vessel thing at least. Unless they are both part of the same Lie-to-Dean conspiracy. He doesn’t know who to trust and everyone seem to know more about him than he does. Suddenly, for the first time, he really becomes aware of how alone he is. It makes him angry, because the alternative would be busting into tears.

“Care to be a little more elaborate than that?” he snaps. “I’ve been running around here for a week now, the bits and pieces of the world I remember don’t fit with the world I see and everyone potentially helpful has fun being cryptically useless. So just answer my fucking questions, you dick!”

Castiel blinks at him. Then he laughs softly, as sound so unexpected the anger nearly dies before flaring up again. “You haven’t changed. I find that pleasing.”

“Changed since when?” he grinds out.

“Since the war started,” Castiel tells him. “We fought together in the beginning. Then we lost you. You and I haven’t met for centuries.”

That’s hard enough to swallow to kill his anger flat. Dean sits down on the ground, the creek still running between him and his answers.

“Wow,” he says. “What?”

 

-

 

Castiel tells him little more, but Dean is too busy digesting what he has been told to care much. He lived more than two centuries ago, back when the world was whole. And then he was just gone, a victim in the war he had been fighting along with this fallen angel. “You weren’t strong enough,” Castiel tells him with something like accusation in his voice, but sadness as well, and “I grieved for you,” as if that’s something he has to know.

“I was dead?” Dean asks, tries to wrap his mind around the idea. “How is it I’m alive now? Is that why I can’t remember?”

“Certainly. It might be an accidental side effect of being returned, but I believe that the one who put you back did this on purpose.”

“Who put me back? And why?” Damn, if Cas would just start telling things without having to be asked ten thousand times! “What’s so damn important about me that I get a free pass back to life?”

Castiel seems vaguely amused by his words. “You have been resurrected from the dead more than once, Dean. You died once and went to hell. You were on the way to becoming a demon yourself when I came and pulled you out.”

It’s not that images of hell flash before Dean’s eyes, but something runs through him, like a pale memory, an echo of terror and agony, and something like glee that makes him shiver.

“You saved me?”

“Then. Not now. I tried, but wasn’t able. And I had already fallen far by the time you were lost. My powers have all but left me by now.”

Dean presses his lips into a thin line, overwhelmed by all the things he doesn’t know. “Why did you fall in the first place?”

“I fell for you,” Castiel tells him outright. Looks straight into his eyes. “Your way, the things you believed in, appealed to me more than the way my brothers were going. You made me realise I had a choice and I chose.”

Dean isn’t sure he wants the answer to his next question even as he asks it. “Was it worth it?”

Castiel hesitates long enough to make him regret having asked, but when he speaks, he says, “Yes. I was not always sure of it, but I have come to find that there are still things, people, worth fighting for in this world.” He looks sideways, at the bag Dean left lying by the side of the creek when he filled up his bottle. “I’m hungry.”

“I thought you were an angel.”

“I was. Now I’m more human than anything else. And I need to eat.”

Not human enough to age, apparently, though. Castiel looks like a man is his mid- or late thirties at best. His dark hair is unkempt and he could do with a razor, but so could Dean, so who is he judge? For a guy who’s been human for two hundred years he doesn’t look half-bad.

“How did I die?” Dean asks. But Cas is already busy opening his bag to glance at his meagre supplies and help himself.

“You are running out of food,” he helpfully informs.

“I am, now.” Dean is vaguely aware of his own hunger, but he’s pretty sure that if he ate now, he’d throw up. “Answer my question.”

“There is a settlement not far from here. A camp of humans like you. They know me and will provide us with food and shelter for a while. I will lead you there.”

It must be the camp Jena mentioned. The thought doesn’t make Dean feel any more confident, but he’s running out of food and options and figures Cas is a better guide than Jena has been. Why exactly he thinks that, he isn’t sure, though. Perhaps because Cas doesn’t creep him out quite as much.

Just a little.

“Tell me,” he insists. “Why was I brought back? Why did they take my memories? What is the _damn point_ of all this?”

But Castiel seems adamant on denying him any further information. “Later, Dean,” he says between bites, his mouth full. “We will talk when there is time. Now we need to move on. It is dangerous to remain in one place for too long.”

“Because of the people thinking I’m a murderer?” Dean asks. He doesn’t really think they followed him this far, not when they obviously fear to stray too far from the protection of their community.

Castiel shakes his head. “Others are looking for you as well, and for me. They better not find us.”

“Why?”

“Because it might negate all our efforts. If those looking for you find you, you’ll have to expect an eternity of torture and suffering. If I am found and contained, it might result in the end of the world.”

 

-

 

True to form, Cas refused to go deeper into this not uninteresting topic. They collected Dean’s few things – with Dean still holding on to his weapon – and wandered on. Dean kept asking questions, but Castiel seemed to be of the opinion that he had learned enough for one day and didn’t give him any more about their personal history.

It was hard to tell the time with a sky that was almost completely unchanging between dawn and dusk, but Dean suspected it was around midday when the alleged fallen angel stopped in the middle of a large, half-collapsed dome. “The first protection wards of the camp have already been crossed. Stronger sigils are used after this point. Even though I am more human than angel, enough of my original nature remains to make passing them… difficult.”

“Ah. And now?”

“Now we wait. Without doubt the disturbance of the sigils we crossed so far have been noted. Soon someone will come and hopefully grant me entrance.”

“You really can’t go on? No surprise you avoid human communities.”

“The sigils repel an angel’s grace, which I have mostly lost. I could enter if I truly wanted to, but it would be difficult and unpleasant. Not all human communities use sigils like this, though. Most are only protected against demons and other creatures. The Enochian sigils used here are not common knowledge.”

“The place I was before had them,” Dean points out. “Did they know you there, too? Or did you break in?”

Castiel looks at him with this blank expression that already annoys Dean after half a day of knowing him. “That place had no protection against angels at all.”

“There were- ” Dean throws back his head as his right fist punches his left palm in fury. “That _bitch_! Lied to me all the way, and I fall for it all. I wonder if anything she told me was true.”

“Am I right to assume that the ‘bitch’ is that Jena person you mentioned before?” Castiel seems slightly taken aback by his outburst, and at the same time slightly amused. Just fabulous.

“The same. Told me there were Enochian symbols all over. Showed me an empty spot on the wall and said there was one and I fucking believed it.” A memory struggles its way into his head. “Wait, Bill mentioned protection against angels as well.” He looks at Cas with narrowed eyes, hating the fact the he has no way of telling which of his new acquaintances is fucking with him.

“There were Enochian symbols scattered on the walls of the outer buildings,” Castiel explains. “Read in the correct order, they formed a rather amusing message to anyone capable of interpreting them planning to enter. They were not for protection. I could pass them without difficulty.”

“What?” Dean says.

“It is entirely possible that the people leaving them there thought they fulfilled a purpose. Things like that have happened before.”

“But… You mean someone lied to them about the symbols? Made them think they are protected when they aren’t?”

“So it seems. Without speaking to the one responsible I can only speculate on the reasons for it. But I can see no reason why the angels should take a special interest in that settlement. Even I only came there following your trace.”

Things are not exactly getting any clearer here. Dean would like to know if Jena was the one who scribbled invisible symbols telling angels to fuck off all over the walls of her hometown as protection – somehow it seems like the kind of thing she’d do. He doesn’t ask, though, because obviously Castiel wouldn’t know.

A second later, the angel answers the question on his own, probably because he can read Dean’s mind and wants to annoy him. “Some of the symbols on the walls have been placed there recently, but most are old – decades or even centuries. The messages are have been written a long time ago. I believe whoever left them also taught the humans there the wrong symbols.”

“What for?”

“Remains a mystery. Perhaps they thought it was funny.” Castiel speaks with a completely straight face, which Dean would find funny if he wasn’t so frustrated and wary.

He doesn’t hear anything, but something tells him that someone’s coming closer. More than one, and probably armed with weapons his pipe doesn’t stand a chance against. He tenses, and beside him, despite his claim of being known to these people, Castiel does the same. Fantastic.

“Are you reading my mind?” Dean asks while they wait. He’d kind of really like to know.

To his surprise, Castiel laughs. “No. Your mind has always been a mystery to me.”

Well, that’s something, at least.

 

-

 

As it turns out, ‘They know me’ is Cas-speak for ‘They know of my existence due to stories passed on from parent to child but I haven’t actually been here in generations, so they might not know what I look like or actually _believe_ in my existence.’ Fortunately, he knows enough about them and their history and personal details from adventures he apparently had with their ancestors to stop them from killing both him and Dean on the spot.

That Castiel is an angel doesn’t help the situation, but that he has been able to cross through the outer rings of wards, something no pure, mojoed-up angel would be able to do, actually makes his claim of who he is more believable. After a while the protection is broken for him and he is allowed inside, Dean in tow and threatened by guns.

Dean finds himself growing tired of having people ready and willing to kill him. It gets old quickly.

In between the wards the actual camp is small, much smaller than Jena’s community, and the looks thrown at them hold a lot more hardness and distrust than curiosity. These men and women are much more willing to kill them as a precaution, rather than take chances because they don’t want to waste one of the few humans left on the planet.

Sensible. It’s not like Dean’s gene-pool will save the species. And Cas… Is Cas even compatible? Dean’ll have to ask him someday. When there are fewer weapons pointed at them and the fallen angel is in a more informative mood.

Cas repeats his story before other people, who seem more important, and he does it with a slight edge of impatience in his voice, as if he were already tired of talking and thinks these people shouldn’t be stupid and question him. It nearly makes Dean grin, but it also makes him uneasy.

Once Castiel’s identity is confirmed, the welcome is… not exactly warm, but weapons are lowered and a lot of people gather to speak to him, ask questions and find out what has brought him back to them after so long a time.

“My friend and I are in desperate need of rest and supplies,” Castiel tells them. “Heaven is making its move, and so, in turn, is Hell. I need to speak to your current leader, alone.”

Everyone grows a little more nervous at that. These are fighters, Dean can tell, but that doesn’t mean they are used to actual battles that count for something. They have existed in a world that wants to kill them for a long time, but it is a stable world in a sense, that now for the first time is threatened to be shaken. Perhaps none of them have expected any notable change in this war to happen during their lifetimes.

As by Castiel’s request, they are taken to their leader, or rather, taken to where the leader will meet them once the others wake him up or something. It’s midday, but Dean knows the sleeping rhythm of people like these. It’s possible.

As the minutes drag on, it becomes more and more possible that their leader, in fact, has died in his sleep, and they have to elect a new one first before this can get anywhere.

“You know,” Dean says after a while of nothing happening, “when you said these people knew you, I thought you actually meant they knew you, not just knew some stories about you. If that’s all, you could have gone just about anywhere and said, Hi, I’m Castiel! Give me food!”

“While there are stories about me, most aren’t known in detail to the general public,” Cas tells him calmly. “These people know more than all the others, due to the history I share with their group.”

“Right. What did you do here anyway? Kill demons with them?”

“Yes. Among other things. We lived here, but at the time this was more of a civilian camp. It was in the beginning, when most people had grown up in a less violent world and had not yet adapted.” He looks sad for a moment. “The change was sudden. From one moment to the next there was danger everywhere. We tried to keep them safe.”

Dean looks around in new interest, but if the room they are in even existed back then, it doesn’t spark any memory in him.

“We lived here?” He tries to picture himself in this place. But Castiel shakes his head.

“Not we. You were already gone at that point.”

“Oh.” That idea is even harder to imagine. “Then who’s this ‘we’ you were talking about?”

“Me and a friend. I was more interested in fighting my former brothers than protecting stray humans at that point. He insisted and made sure I saw why we were fighting them in the first place.” His eyes look far into the past. “At the time, this was one of very few human strongholds left in this country.”

“Are they hunters?” Dean asks, even though he knows the answer to this one. So he’s surprised when Castiel shakes his head.

“No. They’re warriors. Of course,” he adds after a moment of thought, “that’s pretty much the same thing these days, in the sense that they fight what hunters used to fight. Only now those fights sometimes happen on an actual battlefield.”

“Battles between humans and monsters?” Dean tries to imagine that. The result looks vaguely like the battle scenes from _Lord of the Rings_ and he’s pretty sure he’s gotten it wrong. “What’s _Lord of the Rings_?” he hears himself asking out loud.

Castiel looks at him strangely. “They don’t meet for organized battles in that sense. But they fight off attacks and attack on their own. It is not too different from what you did in your time, but the scale is bigger and their enemies are mostly demons. There is little room left for the lesser supernatural creatures. However, things have grown quieter in the last few decades. The heavenly host as well as Lucifer have been… distracted.”

“Distracted from destroying the world?”

“Destroying the world is not their goal. It’s just something they accept if it should come to it.”

That sounds a lot like what Jena has said. Dean shakes his head. “But why-”

“Dean,” Castiel interrupts him. (Funny, he thinks, how quickly he grew used to this name.) “You have learned enough today.”

“I haven’t learned nearly enough.”

“You mentioned the stories I appear in,” Castiel says, as if he hadn’t spoken. “What do you know about me?”

“Nothing but what you told me,” Dean admits, unhappy about the change of topic. “That girl, Jena, she said I should ask about you, but didn’t tell anything more. Said she didn’t want to talk about you because you’re a dick.” Paraphrased, but kind of reflecting his own thoughts.

“Interesting,” Castiel says.

“You sure you don’t know her? Because she sure seems to know you.”

“I didn’t meet anyone of that name there,” Castiel tells him once again. If he wanted to say more, he doesn’t get a chance, because the door opens and a woman comes in, perhaps in her forties, long brown hair streaked with more grey than her face would suggest. She’s on the thin side, wiry, all lean, hard muscles, just like Dean would expect a woman to look who had done nothing all her life but fight evil things.

“Castiel,” she says in greeting, her voice a mix of distrust and awe. “I didn’t expect you to show up here during my lifetime. Excuse the delay, I only just got back.” She doesn’t elaborate what she just got back from and Castiel doesn’t ask. They don’t shake hands, but the woman offers both of them water from a large bottle she brought with her from the outside.

“My name is Pam, Pamela DeMellis,” she introduces herself when she hands them the filled plastic cups. Her look at Dean is expectant.

“Dean,” he introduces himself, not giving a last name because Cas never told him what it is. He doesn’t think busting out with his amnesia would be such a brilliant idea for a first meeting, though, so he leaves it at that and leaves the talking to the fallen angel.

“How have you been lately?” Castiel asks after they sat down on plastic chairs around a sturdy table. “I see your number did not notably decrease since I last came here.”

“Which was damn long ago. I remember you passing through when I was five. If I didn’t, I might not even believe you are real.” She looks at him in open wonder. “You really do not age. I heard about that. Both of you-”

“I remember you,” Cas tells her. “Your grandfather had just been taken by a demon at the time. I was saddened to hear about the loss. We fought together, briefly, when he was younger.”

“You remember me?” Pam seems genuinely surprised, and almost shyly pleased.

Cas smiles thinly, a little sadly. “It’s important to know not only the group but the individual. Know your names, your stories. It reminds me why we are fighting.” For the first time, strangely enough, he seems truly inhuman to Dean. The moment is broken when Castiel adds, “There were not many children around at that time. You, and three others under the age of ten.”

“Well, yeah, there’s never much time to get pregnant around here, if you even make it to the age. And then you have to make it through the pregnancy and the child has to make it to adulthood… You get the idea. Our numbers aren’t as stable as they look to you, we just moved closer together.” She sighs, but it’s resigned more than anything else. “We’re dying out, is what’s happening.”

“As things are, that is unavoidable in the long run.” Castiel seems entirely unsympathetic. “However, things might change soon.”

Pam sits a little straighter. “Is that why you came?”

“…Yes.” Dean notices the slight hesitation, knows it’s a lie, but if Pam noticed as well she doesn’t show it. “Michael lost his patience. He made a move that might force the final confrontation. If that happens, nothing will remain. Be prepared.”

“How do you prepare for the end of everything?” Dean can’t help but ask.

“You don’t have to. There is nothing you can do,” Cas answers solemnly, as if the question hadn’t been rhetorical. “But it is not given that it will happen. I will not stop trying to prevent it. In any case, things will get rough in the near future. The angels are getting active, and so are the demons. There will be some fall-out.”

Pam takes in his words, nods. “I will make warn the others, make preparations. What is Michael doing? Why now? It’s been so long.”

“Too long. He is desperate. He wants this conflict to end, but only on his own terms. His feelings for his brother are still strong. It is… complicated.”

“Complicated?” Pam laughs at that, bitterly. It makes Dean think of Jena; it seems there are only two kinds of laughter in this world: bitter and insane. “They levelled the world and kill our entire fucking species, because things are _complicated_ between them. Just a brotherly conflict, and this is the result. It would be hilarious if it wasn’t so tragic.”

“I agree,” Cas says with a quick glance at Dean. He rolls his head and his shoulders in a stunningly human gesture and slumps on the chair. “Things have only just started, but I advise you not to waste time. Do you trust your people?”

Pam seems momentarily surprised by the sudden question. “Of course I do.”

“There are no potential traitors among you? No one sympathising with heaven or hell?”

The woman frowns. “Why do you ask?”

“It would be bad.”

“No shit,” Dean mutters.

“There aren’t. We all grew up knowing exactly what either side can offer us.”

“We are tired,” Cas says, unhelpfully changing the direction of the conversation once again. “We would like a place to rest before we move on.”

“I already have rooms prepared for you,” Pam says. “There’s food and drink for you too. Stay as long as you like.” She hesitates for a moment, then adds, “We could use your help.”

“I know.” Cas looks at her sadly. “I’m sorry.”

Pam nod her understanding, even as her lips press into a thin line. “It’s just… it’s hard. Where are you headed?”

“Chicago.”

She lets out a quiet whistle. “That’s a long way. Gonna take you weeks.”

“We need to meet someone there. It is important.”

“And I suppose you can’t give me any more details.”

“No. I’m sorry.”

“That’s okay. We understand the need to be careful.” Pam still doesn’t look too happy about it, and Dean thinks, _‘Don’t take it personally. I would like details too, and I’m going there with him. Apparently.’_

After a few more words are exchanged, Pam has hurries away, a couple of men and women in tow, and someone shows Dean and Cas their rooms. They are adjacent, but Cas enters Dean’s room with him and refuses to leave. “We should not separate,” he explains and stands in front of the door. It looks like a coincidence, but Dean still feels like he’s blocking it.

“Chicago, huh?” Dean says. “Care to tell _me_ what we are doing there?”

“Not yet. Not here.”

Dean understands. “You think someone’s listening? I thought you trusted these people.”

The angel throws him a slightly irritated glance. “I haven’t been here for four decades. All those I knew personally are long gone.”

“I see.”

“Go to sleep,” Cas orders. “Tomorrow will be tiring.”

“It’s barely evening.”

“You’re tired.” That almost sounds like an order too, but it makes Dean realise that yes, he is. There hasn’t been much rest in the past few days he was running for his life through the ruins.

As he lies down on the bed – Best damn place he’s slept in since the beginning of his remembered life! – he wonders what it is that will be so tiring tomorrow. Cas told Pam that they would stay for a few days to gather strength for their long journey, so Dean is surprised when his new (old?) friend wakes him only hours later with a touch to his shoulder and the words “We have to go.”

“Already?” Dean mumbles, his mouth full of pillow. Cas doesn’t sound very urgent, so his instincts don’t kick in – except that he finds his hand instinctively sliding under his pillow, feeling for something that isn’t there.

Bleary-eyed he sits up, sleep clinging to him persistently after days on the run. The bed is nice and warm and he doesn’t want to leave it.

Castiel frowns at him. “This is the best time.”

“Where are we going? Is Pam coming with us?”

“Pam doesn’t know about this.”

“Ah.” Dean gets a little more awake as understanding comes to him. “We’re sneaking away in the middle of the night.”

“You slept for nearly eight hours. We were given supplies that will last for a few days.” Cas moves to the window and glances out. Their bags, Dean notices, are already packed.

“Dude, don’t you need any sleep? I thought you were more or less human.”

“It would be dangerous to remain here any longer than this.”

“What’s going on? Anyone coming for us?” Dean slept in his clothes, so he’s pretty much ready to go the moment he leaves the bed.

“Probably.”

“You know, Cas, you’re really not helping.” Even though he’s irritated, Dean keeps his voice down. He probably wouldn’t have had to, because Cas doesn’t even try to be quiet as he leaves the room with Dean in tow.

There are two men and a woman near their room, either watching or protecting them. Castiel walks straight up to them.

“We have to go now. Give Pamela my apologies.”

They are startled, then they protest. One of them runs to get their leader, but the respect-bordering-on-worship they have for the fallen angel makes them step aside when Cas refuses to stop.

“I would appreciate it if you did not draw any more attention to us,” the angel tells them, and though they are clearly not happy, they keep quiet for the moment. Dean wonders how much longer.

It is dark outside, but if he really slept as long as Cas said, it can’t be that long before sunrise. It’s chilly, and for the first time he wonders if it’s because of the season or if the temperature is always this low. The scarce vegetation he saw on his journey could belong to pretty much any season.

The man who’d run for Pam comes back, out of breath, keeping his voice down as he speaks. “Pam says to let them go.” He looks at Castiel. “She says she understands, and good luck.”

“I’m glad.” Cas actually looks glad. “Thank you.”

“We will accompany you through the line of wards.”

Cas only nods. They walk in silence, the other guards they pass only sending them curious glances. Eventually they reach a zone with more plants than Dean has seen anywhere before: half dead trees and dry grass and things that would be weed if they grew in anyone’s garden.

They say goodbye there. Their three armed friends offer to come with them a little longer because you never know what you’ll run into in the dark, but Castiel send them away, insisting on going on alone. Dean got better weapons now than the pipe he used to cling to, and Cas… well, either he doesn’t need weapons, or he’s hidden them well somewhere in his too large jacket.

“It would be dangerous to remain in one place for too long, especially if others know we’re there,” Castiel answers Dean’s unspoken question once they are far enough from the camp to feel out of anyone’s earshot. “These people understand that.”

“You really think there’s a spy among them? Is that why we changed directions trice since we left them?”

Cas is silent for a moment, until Dean is convinced he ignored his question. “We cannot take the risk,” he finally says. “There is too much at stake. Chances are that those we do not wish to find us already know we were there.”

“Who’s after us? And why? Give me some answers, dammit!”

His outburst only results in a disapproving stare. “Keep your voice down. You’re attracting attention.”

“There’s no one within five miles whose attention could be attracted.”

“There is. Be sure of it. Just hope it’s no one caring for our presence.” Castiel’s voice is tight. “We are being followed. Our presence at that place endangered everyone there.”

The night air is chilly. The sun is coming up, colouring the distant horizon a deep red. “You knew that and went there anyway.” Dean’s voice is quiet now.

“It was a risk I had to take. You needed rest and we needed supplies. If we have been followed, those following us would show up there sooner or later anyway.”

Dean isn’t convinced. This still feels wrong to him, like they’re betraying those people.

“We were too close to the camp to begin with. Both sides know we had connections to that place. They will go there for sure, inquiring about us. Pamela understands that. Yet they are safe, as long as none of their own betrays them.” Castiel sounds almost regretful, though, as if he’s convinced the betrayal will happen.

“What’s gonna happen when someone looks for us there? Will their wards protect them?”

“Not against everything. But probably they will be subtle. They will ask where we are, what we are planning. If our friends answer truthfully, no harm might come to them. They are insignificant.”

“Will they answer truthfully?”

“Of course. To the best of their knowledge.”

“That’s why you told them we are going to Chicago.”

“Pamela must know this was a lie. She will pass on the information.”

“You lied to them to keep them safe? Or because you knew they’d betray us if you told the truth?”

Castiel keeps walking, towards the brightening horizon. “If their ancestors left them as much knowledge as they ought to have, they would rather die than willingly betray us. Too much is at stake.”

“What, exactly? Who’s looking for us and why?” Dean has a clear idea on the who, but he’s getting rather fed up with vague answers to the other question. Cas can bring on the end of the world. That’s really lacking in details.

“The armies of heaven and hell,” Cas answers the first question as if it was obvious, and yeah, it kind of is. “They are looking for me because I have something they need. They look for you for differed, but related reasons.”

“Care telling me what they are?”

“Later.”

“Why not now?”

“Because I need to concentrate.”

“On what?”

Castiel, helpful as ever, doesn’t answer. For a long time, they walk in silence, keeping between the buildings where possible, but they have become less in height and in number. The vegetation increases, though it doesn’t look any more healthy than the few plants that made it into the heart of a city that by all rights should have turned into a jungle by now.

“Cas?” Dean asks what feels like hours later, under a sky that seems to be made only of dust. “What happens if the end of the world doesn’t come? If we win? What exactly are we fighting for here?”

Castiel has no answer for him. At least none he wants to give.

 

.

 

“So, where are we headed?”

They’re sitting on the cold, hard ground, having a meal that barely fills Dean’s stomach. There’s a lot more food they’re carrying around, but Castiel only gave out this much, so Dean assumes they’re going to be walking for a while. Great. On the other hand, he doesn’t want to stop in any other human settlement while they are on the WANTED list of two different kinds of hell. (He thinks of the first community he stopped in, wonders if anything happened to them. Wonders if he’ll ever know.)

If there even are any settlements around. They have reached the outer limits of the city and find themselves in a wilderness made of fields, crippled trees and broken rocks. There is enough cover not to be spotted from afar but Dean still feels exposed. He wonders what will happen to them when they are caught, but there are so many questions he has to ask, and this one will have to wait in line.

“I can’t tell you,” Cas says, his mouth full. He may have been an angel, but that definitely didn’t do anything for his manners. Dean thinks he hears someone complain about that in his mind, but it sure as hell isn’t him, because he speaks with his mouth full too.

“Why not? You think someone’s listening?”

Cas doesn’t answer.

“Or don’t you trust me?”

Cas doesn’t answer.

Dean feels like punching him. “You said we used to be friends. You came all this way, endangered those people to find me, and now you can’t even tell me where we’re going?”

Castiel’s eyes, when he finally looks at him, are dark. “We were friends, and I will do anything I can to help you,” he confirms. “But I don’t trust you. Not yet.”

It’s the last two words that make Dean snort and say, “Fair enough.” He’s only just come back after two hundred years, after all. Probably has to prove that he’s still himself.

There’s more silence as they finish their meal. Afterwards they remain sitting between the sickly looking trees because hunted or not, Cas seems to agree that they could do with an extended break. As long as they don’t hear the hellhounds howling in the distance, Dean decides, things are not so urgent that they can’t sit on their asses for a while. Wherever they are going, there is still an awful lot of walking ahead of them.

“I have this list in my head,” Dean says after a few minutes. “A long, long list of questions I want answered, but with the ones I’ve been asking so far, I haven’t really gotten satisfying answers. Which annoys me, as you might understand, because this damn list just doesn’t get shorter. So why don’t you, Cas, for the sake of my list, just tell me something you can tell me, so I can cross the related questions off my list?”

 “To my experience, questions and answers don’t really work in that order,” Cas says with a half-smile and a calculating glance. “But very well. Give me a general topic and I’ll see what I can do for you.”

Dean doesn’t have to think for long. “The sky,” he says. “And the general destruction around us, while we’re at it.” It seems a safe enough topic. These are things everyone but Dean must already know, so even if they were being spied on or Dean would feel the need to go and pass on everything Cas revealed to him to whatever enemy, no one would probably get anything useful out of it. So the sky it is. He’s been wondering about that since he woke up here, two hundred years in the future and far from home.

Cas looks up, as if he has to check what exactly Dean is talking about. “Ah, that,” he mumbles. “What you see there is the result of an archangel’s wrath.”

“What, this city was destroyed by an angel throwing a temper tantrum?”

“In a manner of speaking. It was, in fact, destroyed in battle. But it was also destroyed to make a point. He was at that point already occupying his destined vessel and his adversary was not. This wave of destruction, and others, were demonstrations of his power – a power that is unmatched by anyone except another archangel of his strength, and even that only if in the perfect vessel.”

Dean nods his understanding. “So he wanted to say, ‘Look, I’m better than you’?” Cas mentioned before that all this was a fight between two brothers. It seems to him like the way brothers would act.

“Among other things. But it was also a message to his adversary’s vessel.” Castiel’s face is closed off, his gaze going to a far distance. “‘Look, this is your fault. There is only one who would have the power to stop me, but he’s helpless to fight me because you refuse to play your part.’”

Dean shivers as he thinks of one tiny little mortal between the beings that did this. In the face of that, what chance did an insignificant human have? “Did he get the message?”

Cas laughs dryly. “Yes, he did. It didn’t change anything.”

“He didn’t say yes?”

“Never.”

The word is spoken with gravity, like all the laws of the world are contained within. Castiel isn’t looking at Dean, isn’t looking at the horizon his eyes are fixing on. For a second, Dean thinks he sees the ghost of a smile on his lips, but his eyes are sad, and then the second passes with the fallen angel sighing and saying, “As for the sky, this is what happens when the highest forces of heaven and hell chose your world as a battlefield.”

“Will it go away when this is over? Will everything return to normal?”

“I don’t know. This is the first apocalypse I live through.” The seriousness with which Cas says those words make them seem a lot less silly than they should be.

This crosses a few questions off Dean’s lists. Elemental knowledge, but nothing he can be expected to know, having been conveniently dead through all of it. He wonders how exactly he died, and most of all he wonders who exactly he was, and why he feels like maybe he doesn’t really want to know, because whenever he tries to think about it, his mind latches onto the next best thing it can find to distract itself.

He wonders if he’ll ever remember anything about his life but that the sky used to be blue and he knew how to kill things.

“Who was I?” he finally asks. “I was a hunter, right? Is that how we met?”

“You were a hunter,” Cas confirms. “You grew up into this life because of your father, who made it his life’s work to hunt down the demon who killed your mother when you were four years old. You were hunting together with your brother. In the hunting community, you had made quite a name for yourselves. But that is not the reason I was sent to you. In this apocalypse you have a very specific role to play, so I was sent to retrieve your soul from hell after you died.”

“From hell.”

Castiel crooks his head. “Yes.”

“Why was I in hell?” What kind of person had he been? He suddenly feels sick.

“You made a deal.” Castiel’s voice is soft, softer than it has been ever before. “To save your brother. You sold your soul to a demon to bring him back to life.”

Relief floods through Dean. For a moment he feels dizzy, is glad he’s already sitting. “I went to hell for my brother?”

Castiel hesitates a moment before he answers. “You did it to bring him back,” he finally confirms.

“My brother…” The whole hell thing is a bit more than he can tolerate. Dean feels sick, like he’s going to throw up again. “Why isn’t he…” No, that would be a stupid question. It’s been centuries. “He’s dead, isn’t he?”

“Yes.”

Dean’s voice is a whisper and he doesn’t know why. “What happened to him?”

Cas gets to his feet and picks up his bag. “We should move on,” he says, his eyes on the horizon. “We have already lingered here for too long.”

 

-

 

The area changes again. They reach a lake that’s turned to mud long ago, only a few puddles of murky brown water left. They don’t even try to look for a puddle that’s offering anything drinkable. Castiel, apparently, is familiar enough with this area to know it would be pointless.

Most of their water bottles are empty, but Castiel doesn’t seem worried, so Dean isn’t either. He just walks after the angel, hour after hour after hour and never once thinks about his brother, or the demon that killed his mother.

The night they spend between scattered rocks. Cas insists on keeping watch, and Dean insists on keeping watch in his place. Cas needs to sleep too, that much is obvious from the shadows under his eyes and the weary slump of his body. In the end they agree on keeping watch alternately. Dean goes to sleep first, and he when he opens his eyes to the grey dark hours later, his heart is pounding so wildly in his chest he thinks he must have woken up screaming. But Cas, sitting beside him, only blinks to acknowledge his waking and comes over to take Dean’s place on the ground.

Dean’s heart is still beating hard from the unremembered dream as he sits in the dark, listening, watching. There is nothing for a long time, and then a man climbs up the stones towards him. Dean stares at him for a long moment, his heartbeat calm and steady, until suddenly he becomes aware of what he’s seeing and he jumps to his feet and raises the gun Pam’s people gave him, calling for Cas.

“There’s no need to fear me, Dean,” the man says. “I mean you no harm.”

“Of course not,” Dean spits, and calls again. “Cas!”

Castiel, usually alert to the sound of every fucking falling leaf, doesn’t stir.

“Who the fuck are you?” Dean spits out. The stranger is nearer now, almost right beside him. Now he isn’t so preoccupied with taking in the fact that he’s even there but actually looks at him, Dean sees that he’s barely a man at all, hardly more than a boy. He can’t be older than twenty, he thinks, but somehow he knows that the guy is much, much older. He gives Dean the same feeling Castiel sometimes does, during his weirder moments, but it’s so much stronger now.

Even in the dark grey of night, the man is clearly visible and nothing about this feels in any way natural. “You’re an angel,” Dean realises.

The man nods. “I am Michael.”

Dean just stares at him.

Michael sighs; like a patient father dealing with a slow child. “Dean,” he says gently. “Do you remember me?”

“We met before?” Dean asks dumbly. The fucking archangel Michael is sitting in front of him and wants to talk about old times. As if the last few days weren’t enough to take in already.

“Yes, Dean. We met. We’re fighting the same war on the same side. You’re important to us, to me. I was the one who brought you back.”

“You were-” Dean stops, trying to wrap his mind around that. “Why?”

There is a look of surprised hurt on Michael’s young face. “Castiel didn’t tell you?”

“Cas didn’t tell me anything but that you’re a megalomaniac dick who’s hell bend on levelling the globe in a fight with his brother.”

“Ah.” Michael’s gaze becomes hard. “I feared as much. Castiel is keeping too many secrets from you. He will mislead you, as he was misled long ago. You cannot trust him.”

“Oh, really? So far a lot of people have told me things that make it hard to trust _you_.”

“And who are you referring to?” Michael asks gently. “An angel who fell from grace and turned on his own brothers and sisters? Who constantly lies to you and keeps you in the dark about things you should know? Give me one reason why you should take his word on anything.”

Dean has to admit that he can’t. Castiel’s continued refusal to tell him anything personal about Dean himself has frustrated him more than he can tell. After everything he has heard about him and his war, he wants to despise the angel before him, but he can’t shake off the feeling that by pushing him away he might rid himself of the one person who might actually truly be willing to help him.

“Who am I?” he asks. “Why am I so important to you?” His heart is beating wildly again, in nervous anticipation of the answer.

“Dean?”

Three metres away, Castiel turns over to blink at him, and when Dean turns back to Michael, the archangel is gone.

 

-

 

It’s probably a mistake, but Dean doesn’t mention the nightly visit to his companion. Cas eyes him contemplatively a few times but if he notices anything, he doesn’t mention it.

They move on when the sky starts to brighten, Dean’s hands stiff with the cold of night despite the fingerless gloves they got at the camp. He begins to wonder, for the first time, why they are so dependant on the weapons, food and clothes Pam’s people gave them. If Castiel knew he was back and came to find him, as he claimed, why didn’t he bring any supplies but the clothes he happened to be wearing in that moment?

They reach the lake before afternoon. Dean can see it used to be a deep one, and large. Probably beautiful, with boats sailing on it and trees and small towns lining the shores. Now most of the water is gone, the trees are dead, the towns in ruins. They have to walk far into the crater it used to fill to find water, but what they find is clear enough to be drinkable after some filtering.

Dean looks around, tries to find any landmarks that are familiar, but his broken memory is unwilling to come up with anything that might tell him where they are.

He’s pretty certain that once he sees something he used to know, he’ll remember the place. His brain has so far been more than willing to revive any knowledge that’s not tied to his personal life.

But he can still come to some conclusions about his life from what he knows. For example, he’s rather sure that he has seen a lot of landmarks in a lot of places, so he must have come around a lot. And probably not on foot.

“I travelled a lot in the past, didn’t I?”

Castiel, who’s crouching in the mud and more or less successfully filtering the water though the cloth before filling it into one of their empty bottles, looks up only briefly. “Of course. Most active hunters do. It comes with the job.”

Okay, so maybe his deduction wasn’t as clever as he’d thought. Dean stretches, rubs his hands to warm them up and asks, “Are we going anywhere in particular or are we just running around without purpose.”

“We are, at the moment, running around,” Cas admits. “With purpose,” he adds.

“The purpose of keeping moving?”

“Exactly. We need to avoid getting found.”

“Great. And then what? Is this going somewhere, Cas? Or do you think we can just keep avoiding them until they get bored?”

Cas lets out an irritated sigh. “You don’t understand the situation.”

“Well, obviously not! Because you’re doing a shit job at explaining the fucking situation! How about you tell me why we’re running in the first place? I get that demons are unpleasant, but why would they be after me in particular?” He very nearly confronts Cas with Michael’s  words, with his warning not to trust Cas because he’s keeping too many things from him. The words are on his tongue, but he keeps them in because he really doesn’t trust Cas, has no reason to, and doesn’t want to give him a chance to feed him more lies in order to keep Dean from listening to Michael, who at least seems to care enough to tell him what the fuck is going on.

Castiel puts the lids back on the filled bottles and stuffs them into his bag with measured movements. He seems fully concentrated on his task, but Dean senses that he’s actually contemplating answering and what to say, so he holds his breath and hopes the angel will come to a useful decision for once.

“The demons are after you because you are important to the angels. With you, their enemy would have the chance to wipe them off the face of the earth without breaking into sweat. So they are very interested keeping you from them.”

Michael said he had brought Dean back to life. He said he was important. “So the demons want to kill me?”

Castiel smiles without humour. “There would be no point in that, the angels would just bring you back. No, but they would keep you prisoner, hide you away and torture you until you break and serve only their purpose, no longer the enemy’s.”

Dean stares at him, trying to take that in. He wonders if too many revelations like that in too short a time can make you go numb, stop you from caring about them. If so, he hasn’t reached that point yet. “Charming prospect,” he hears himself say. “Well, tough. Like I’d ever become the demons’ bitch!”

“You have before,” Cas tells him, this time without hesitation. “They broke you in hell until you willingly played your part and broke the first seal to Lucifer’s cage. Only you could have done it, and you did. It enabled the demon Lilith to break the other seals until your brother broke the last one and Lucifer was freed.” His eyes, as he looks at Dean, are surprisingly gentle. “You set the apocalypse in motion, Dean.”

Dean can’t quite think of anything to say. The words that eventually leave his mouth are, “You’re lying.”

“I’m not. But you must know, with both heaven and hell manipulating you to fulfil your destiny, you never had a chance to avoid this. For this, at least, you cannot be blamed.” The angel’s voice is soft. “In fact, no one ever blamed you, but yourself.”

“Then why do the angels want me?” Dean whispers. “If I already played my part, why am I still here?” Another thought comes to him. “And my brother – what’s this, a family curse?” He feels sick – it’s all too much at once. “He freed Lucifer from hell? Is that why he got killed? Because he was working with them?” The same brother he went to _fucking hell_ for?

“Your brother was manipulated even more than you were. His fate was decided long before he was born, but he never took his place among their lines. He was made to break the seal while actively trying to stop just that from happening.” Suddenly the gentleness is gone from Castiel’s voice, his face. Dean’s unknown brother seems to be a sensitive topic and Dean decides never to mention him to the angel again. It’s fine by him. He doesn’t want to talk about the guy either.

Looking around, he takes in the broken world, outlined before a broken sky, and thinks _‘I did this.’_

Perhaps this feeling that crushes him down, this crippling guilt and desperation, is the real reason why Cas didn’t want him to know.

“How can you not blame me?” he whispers.

“You had no choice in the matter and therefore carry no responsibility, not for starting this. The demons dragged you down to hell and the angels let you be tortured and twisted until it was too late. They let it happen because both sides wanted the apocalypse. As a human, you had no choice but to be crushed.” Castiel sounds a little tense, as if he’s ready to leave this topic behind. So is Dean – hell, he wants nothing more than to not think about this anymore – but Cas is talking, and he has to ask, has to know, has to torture himself that little bit more.

“Why am I here, Cas? What do they want me for this time? What more can I do for them? I already broke the world.”

Castiel shakes his head as if asking Dean not to pose these questions, his eyes large and dark. But Dean has asked and Castiel’s shoulders slump as he says, “You are Michael’s chosen vessel.”

And with that, the weight of this whole broken world is right back on his shoulders.

 

-

 

They walk more, for hours, through a landscape that barely changes. Just one foot before the other, with little distraction, and Dean loses himself in the monotonous activity. Doesn’t think at all. Except he does. The thoughts just keep coming, and he is helpless to stop them because he doesn’t even really notice what he’s thinking about until he reaches up to wipe the tickling dust off his face and his fingers come away wet.

He’s glad Castiel is walking before him and never looks back.

They are walking through the wasteland that Lucifer created because Michael wasn’t strong enough to stop him. He wasn’t strong enough, because Dean didn’t allow him to be. Cas, Pam, Jena, they all had told him that to both archangels, humans were inconsequential, collateral damage. That destruction was unavoidable no matter who won. But Dean couldn’t not look around and wonder how much of this he could have prevented.

How much he still could prevent, still save. He was tiny, powerless, couldn’t do anything. But Michael…

Michael could.

“Michael has little love for mankind,” Cas told him, his voice urgent, like a warning. “He tolerated you to please his father, but God left long ago and Michael no longer has a reason to deal with the annoyance you are to him. Even if he wins, even if there is anything left on this planet after he and Lucifer are done with each other, he will still purify the world of everything he considers tainted. There will be little left of your race when he is done.”

But there is little left of his race now, and Dean can’t help but wonder what Michael could possibly do to his people to make this any worse.

As things are, Lucifer is all powered up, and the only thing keeping him from burning the globe to a crisp and let his demons reign free is that he wants to throw a few punches with his big bro first. Dean shudders when he thinks that even now, the devil is effectively ruling the world.

Because he is the most powerful one. Because some asshole said yes and let him have it all without giving a rat’s ass about the consequences.

He wonders what price, what reward that person sold the world for.

“Why do they even try?” he finds himself asking, his voice quiet and his eyes on the sky somewhere above Cas’ head. “What are they still living for?” Jena’s words come back to him. “Wouldn’t it be better for it all to end?”

Peace.

Even without really looking at him, Dean can still see how Cas’ shoulders become stiff. The glance thrown over the angel’s shoulder is sharp and hard, as is his voice. “Are you speaking for your species or for yourself?”

“Have you looked around lately? There is nothing here to live for! This world is a graveyard, and even if for some reason the war stops without a big bang, it’s never going to be the same, is it?” Dean takes a deep breath, trying to control his emotions. “That’s what you didn’t want to tell me, right? In the best case scenario, it doesn’t get worse. It’s never going to get better.” He balls his hands into fists, suddenly so very angry. “We fight for nothing.”

“You’re not fighting at all,” Cas snaps at him. “You’re running.”

“Well, it’s hard to fight if you don’t even know what for! All I can do is run right after you!”

Dean’s words seem to pass Castiel by without impression. His eyes flare and he’s finally stopped walking. “I have looked around, Dean. I see this world every day. I have lived in it when you haven’t. And I’ve come to know mankind. These people you met? They still live. They still know love and passion and take joy wherever they can. They might not fight for a better future, but they still fight for their families and friends. Their life is hard and often painful, but it’s not an existence made only of suffering. This isn’t hell, Dean, not yet.”

“How can you say that? Lucifer rules it!”

Cas laughs at that, just a short, harsh “Ha” without humour.

“You don’t have a family, or friends.” Dean spits out the words, wanting to hurt but with no idea if he even can. Perhaps Cas doesn’t care for all that. “Or a future, while we’re at it. What the hell are _you_ fighting for?”

Castiel glares at him, the muscles in his jaw working. He looks so angry, like he wants to turn Dean to ashes with this stare. But when he speaks his voice is calm, very calm, and very hard. “I fight for your people because they deserve it. Because a friend did, and suffered for it, and never stopped. If nothing else, I fight for him.”

Loyalty, then. It’s nearly laughable. How dedicated can you be in the face of this? How long has Castiel’s friend been dead now? How long until he finds that this all wasn’t worth it?

Dean doesn’t buy it.

“This world has nothing to offer you,” he points out. “Nothing at all. Why did you fall? For this? Certainly not.”

“Like I said, I fell for you. I wanted to fight this fight with you because I thought it was right.” Cas is calmer now, no longer burning with anger, just giving an explanation. “Of course back then I didn’t know how willing you were to give up.” But still aiming to hurt. Well, Dean is in no position to complain. He won’t take the bait.

“You said it yourself: you thought it was worth it. Past tense. Look me in the eye and tell me honestly that you wouldn’t go back to heaven if you could.”

Castiel looks him in the eyes and tells him, “I could go back if I wanted. It would be a risk, but they would likely take me, because I have something they want. I remain here. I have been alone for more than a century. Because it is worth it. The fight is. The purpose is right. It was you who let me down.”

And damn, Cas does know how to hit where it hurts.

“Why did you even come here?” Dean asks tightly. “Why drop everything and come to pick me up from the wilderness when obviously you can’t even stand me?”

“Because you are my friend and I will always do my best to help you,” Cas says simply. “Also, I have missed you.”

“Yeah? You don’t really look it.”

“Because you are grating on my patience.”

“You’re the one who’s keeping secrets! Who doesn’t trust me. Who runs all the time – from the enemy, from questions, and then accuses _me_ of giving up!”

“Are you not? Do you not right now think about letting Michael have you? You look at this world and you can’t stand it, and you feel it’s your responsibility because you idiotically blame yourself for this mess due to things entirely out of your control. And you think it would be better if Michael won. Better than the alternative. You’d have the peace death won’t offer you, and tell yourself you’re taking responsibility for the mess you caused, when really, you’re just running away.” There’s open challenge in Castiel’s eyes. “Am I close?” He goes on before Dean can lie to him: “Let me take the burden of that decision from you; it’s not in your power anymore, so you can stop worrying about it. Michael is in no hurry to take you back – he already found another vessel strong enough to serve his purpose for the moment.”

 _‘Yes, I know. He looked quite comfortable in the guy,’_ Dean wants to say but doesn’t. Helpless anger has taken his voice. Who is Castiel-the-fucking-fallen-angel-of-the-lord to judge him like that?

Who is Dean to be judged like that? Judged like that by someone who knows him so much better than he knows himself?

“Dean,” Cas says, his voice calmer, but tense. “I understand that it is hard. It’s always been hard for you – that’s why I didn’t want to tell you earlier. But now – now we have to move on.”

“Moving on where? We’re going nowhere.” Dean’s voice is bitter, and he knows he’s not giving the best impression, but he can’t help it. “Well, it’s comforting that at least you seem to know the way.”

“We should move on,” Cas says, his voice tighter still, “and quickly, because there are several people heading this way. Be quiet.”

Dean is, and then he hears it too. Cas’ ears are definitely better than his, and hopefully better than the ears of those people too, because what Dean hears is just at the edge of his hearing range. Still, it’s definitely human voices, slowly coming closer. Unhurried and unconcerned. They probably didn’t notice them yet.

There is the question of why they should run from humans, but Cas seems to know what he’s doing, and Dean, for once, doesn’t question it. They hurry up a low rocky hill, then down the steep, broken stones on the other side. Cas stops for a second, looking around hurriedly, thus telling Dean that he might know the area, but he certainly doesn’t know every detail. Eventually the fallen angel finds what he is looking for and heads for a half-hidden gap between rocks that turns out to be deeper than it looks from the outside and offers just enough room for two people to squeeze in.

The voices come closer still, soon are audible without Dean having to strain to hear them. Then there is silence for a long time, and Dean doesn’t know if that is because they noticed them or if they simply ran out of things to say.

His question is answered when he hears their footfalls on the gravel: quick, but not hurried, and clearly audible. Not the footfalls of someone trying to sneak closer.

Eventually they come into sight: a group of four, three men and a woman, carrying rifles on their backs and knifes in their belts. They don’t seem to be after anything, though, so the weapons must be a precaution, like theirs. They walk by without looking up to where Dean and Cas are hiding and eventually pick up their conversation again, but by then they are too far away for Dean to make out the words.

Dean wants to move out of the gap; the closeness to Castiel suddenly too uncomfortable with the issues still hanging between them. But Cas holds him back, and only makes a shushing noise when he tries to protest. Shakes his head, so Dean waits, and waits, hearing nothing but Castiel’s breath in his ear.

It’s a long few minutes before Cas allows him to move, and even when they are outside, the angel remains tense, far more alert than he was before. Dean accepts that this isn’t a good time to continue their argument, so he only asks, “Not human?”

Cas shakes his head. “Demons.”

Dean thinks back to the four, trying to see what gave them away. “How do you know?”

“I felt it. Their nature appals me.”

“Oh. That’s handy.” Dean doesn’t ask what the demons are doing here, why they possessed those people. Demons have no corporeal body of their own, so to remain active in this world, they need to possess someone. And that doesn’t always serve a specific purpose. More often than not the demon just wants to have fun. Hell is… well, hell. No one, not even a demon, needs a specific reason to leave it.

But he wonders if these demons in particular are looking for them. Cas’ warning about what they’d do to him if they found them makes him shiver.

“Are there more?”

“I don’t know.”

“I thought you could sense them.”

“Only when I see them.” Cas is still tense, and so is Dean. “And not even that is reliable. I am mostly human now – too many of my former abilities have left me.”

“That’s not helping at all.” Dean looks around, sees only rocks, dust. A few trees in the distance and no trace of the next town. “What do we do now?”

“Proceed with caution,” Cas says. Dean grimaces at him.

“Do we even have a destination? If not, it’ll be easier to avoid anyone.”

Cas nods slowly. “There is nowhere in particular we have to be. But I fear this entire area is contaminated. There might even be a demon’s nest somewhere nearby. For certain there are more than the ones we saw.”

“Some guide you are. I thought you knew this area.”

“Things change. I know the area geographically, but I haven’t been here in a decade. The nest is new. There hasn’t been much activity for a while. Since the war came to a standstill, most angels returned to heaven for the time being, and the demons keep to themselves, merely terrorizing smaller communities for their entertainment.” While he speaks, Castiel keeps looking around; whether for other demons or a safe route or both, Dean doesn’t know.

“Are they looking for us?” he asks. “Are they here now because of me?”

“I don’t know. It is likely.” Cas’ eyes settle on one direction, a frown on his face. “In any case, they will be on the lookout for you. Word of your return travelled fast.”

And Dean still doesn’t know what he was brought back for. He knows better than to ask, though. There is a time and a place, and this is neither one nor the other.

“Great. So what is the safest route?”

“If I knew that, I wouldn’t be standing here thinking,” Castiel informs him. He turns once on the spot, as if to contemplate every direction and make a decision. Or to pick blindly and chose a direction at random…

“The way we came is out of the question. Too close to the path the demons took, and we’re already so far in their territory that it would be the longest route to get out of it.” He looks over a long stretch of flat ground without cover that Dean would have ruled out even without demons on their tail. “Unwise for obvious reasons,” he says. Then he points in the direction they had originally been walking in. “The demons went this way, so we won’t. And that way” – he looks east, where the orange of the daytime-sky is beginning to fade – “is leading to a town. The nest is likely to be there.”

“Doesn’t leave an awful lot to choose from.” Darkness is approaching slowly. The demons will not be hindered by it – it will hide them, not Cas and Dean. Dean feels tense, nervous, doesn’t know if it’s the approaching night or an old instinct that tells him something more substantial is coming for them.

Together they turn to the last way open to them. “What’s wrong with this one?” Dean asks?

Castiel’s shoulders slump. “Nothing. I just don’t like it very much.”

“Less than demons?” But the angel only starts walking, quietly, listening for noises not caused by them. Always intent on keeping in the shelter of the rocks. Dean follows just as quietly, words burning on his tongue and the silence burning in his ears.

 

-

 

Dean is tense, all his senses tuned to his surroundings, but he’s also getting tired of walking. The constant danger doesn’t push up his adrenaline level so much that rest becomes impossible. Instead, the tension feels familiar, like he’s used to it, and judging by all he’s learned about himself, he probably is.

It’s dark by the time Castiel allows them to take a break. The area is still littered with rocks, but they are fewer in numbers and smaller, not offering much protection from being spotted. The soft hills they have been climbing up and down for hours do – as long as no one is anywhere near them.

They haven’t seen another living being for hours, not demon, not animal. Not even a plant.

“Are we ever going to get somewhere?” Dean eventually picks up the old topic. “I mean, do you have a place to hide, or do we just keep wandering around until we fall over dead?”

“I know several places to hide,” Cas tells him. “However, it would be dangerous to remain in any place, no matter how far off, for too long. Especially now you are with me.” He’s sitting on the slope of the hill, a few meters from Dean. The bag with the food is open beside him, but he hasn’t eaten anything yet, instead staring down into the valley below; a large pool where the darkness seems to gather.

Dean doesn’t like the answer. He’s exhausted, and he wants to do something, fight something, just do something with more purpose than simply staying alive so he can run a little longer. “You know we are running out of supplies, right? Having somewhere to be would help with that.”

“I had planned to stop in another settlement soon. The way there is blocked right now, but until we come across another opportunity, we can hunt.”

“Wait, what? You know someone’s after our asses and willing to toast anyone who helps us and still want to lead them to other settlements?”

“As soon as we’re sighted anywhere _near_ a community they are going to check there,” Castiel defends his plan. “But they’re not going to harm them for helping us, only if they refuse to help _them_. The people are in no more danger if we actually go there than if we don’t, as long as they don’t know where we’re going, or try to protect us. They won’t. I have no further connection to the communities in this area. We’ll be merely passing wanderers.”

“And how do we keep them from killing us on sight, Mr. Angel of the Lord?”

“These are no camps of hunters,” Cas explains, his eyes still fixed on the valley, so much darker than the rest of the night. “They won’t recognize what I am. Most settlements don’t even know that sigils against angels exist.”

“Seriously?” Dean is honestly surprised. “Then how did they even survive this long?”

For the first time in forever, Castiel looks at Dean. “Angels are not like demons, Dean,” he reminds him. Dean wonders if there’s wounded pride in his voice, or if he’s just tired of the conversation. “They don’t destroy and torture for the sake of it. Most of them couldn’t care less if the humans there lived or died. There is no reason for most to ward against them.” He looks away again, at the blackness. “Many of them even still live in the misguided belief that angels will be their salvation. That God is still with us.”

Dean thinks of Bill’s words, and of Jena’s. He doesn’t say anything else but stares into the darkness with Castiel, slowly chewing his food. He’s ravenously hungry, but lacks the desire to eat and is tired of the tasteless stuff they carry around with them. “Hunt, you say?” he mutters after a while. “Hunt what, exactly?”

“Boar,” Cas mutters back. “Deer.”

“Where? We haven’t seen another living thing for hours. Not even traces of wildlife.”

“We have to cross this area.” Cas’ voice is distant, down in the valley with the shadows. “We have just enough food left for it. In about two days we’ll find life again.”

Dean is quiet for a moment, listens to the night. The world is still and dead, not offering any noises he might have been used to before. In a world like that, it is hard to imagine that anything could be even more lifeless. But as he sits still and soaks in the air around him, Dean begins to understand that perhaps the tension he felt all night hasn’t only been caused by the possibility of demons.

“What happened here?” he asks quietly.

Castiel just stares into the valley and Dean stares with him. The longer he looks, the more his eyes get used to the empty blackness, the more he can see that it isn’t empty at all.

There are shapes in there, shapes that look like buildings. The ruins of another town, and Dean doesn’t know why, when he has seen so many destroyed places since he woke up to this future, he finds this one so very chilling.

“I hid here, once, in a cave on the other side of the valley,” Castiel says, his voice emotionless. “The angels killed this town slowly. They knew I was watching. They thought that since I fought on the side of humanity, I would present myself to them if it would make them stop the murders.”

A shiver runs down Dean’s spine. “And you didn’t.”

Castiel doesn’t reply. They sit in silence, Dean chewing on his food until he gives up and stuffs the leftovers into his pocket, still hungry but devoid of appetite. The angel never even pretends to eat.

“That is why you didn’t want to come this way,” Dean says after a while.

“The entire area is dead,” Castiel explains. “It will take almost two days to cross it, during which we will come across no vegetation, no human settlements. Animals stay away from this place.”

“Bullshit. You didn’t want to come here because you don’t want to face the people you let die. People you could have saved.”

“Do not judge me without knowing what was at stake.”

“How am I supposed to know what this was about if you won’t tell me anything?” And they’re back at that again. Dean almost feels bad for bringing it up, here, but damn it, he’d like to know what Castiel considers worth the lives of so many people.

But Castiel doesn’t say anything in return. “Yeah, that’s what I thought,” Dean mutters.

They soon walk further down the slope, carefully and slowly. The way is slippery and dangerous in the dark, but Dean suspects that Cas is also reluctant to get closer to the dead town below them. He wonders what exactly happened here, but Cas wouldn’t answer, so he doesn’t ask.

After a while they find a more sheltered place behind a wall of broken-off earth and Dean goes to sleep first, not even offering Cas a choice, because he’s angry and frustrated and doesn’t really want to speak to him. Sleep flees him, though. He keeps moving unwanted thoughts in his mind until he drifts away without noticing it and comes awake to a brightening sky with a racing heart and a name tasting bitter on his tongue.

If he’s spoken aloud, Cas doesn’t let on it. He doesn’t even turn, sitting straight and tense between Dean and the open stretch of hill below them. Between Dean and the town he let die, as if shielding one from the other’s sight.

“We’ll leave as soon as the light allows it,” Cas says, stands, and comes over to take Dean’s place under the blankets. Dean goes on watch, rubbing his cold hands together, shivering in the chill air.

Somehow he expected this place to be colder than the rest of the land. It isn’t. But the strange light in here leaves Cas more time to sleep than it would have elsewhere, only tentatively reaching out to the still, broken houses below as if afraid to touch them.

Michael comes to him again that morning. Dean isn’t even particularly surprised – after everything he’s learned the day before, he thinks they should have a prolonged conversation.

“So, I’m your vessel, huh? No wonder I’m so important to you.”

“Castiel should have told you from the beginning,” Michael says softly, with a sad sigh.

“So should you.”

“I did not need to. You knew it, didn’t you? You knew from the moment we first met.”

Dean can’t deny it – he feels drawn to the archangel in a way he doesn’t with Castiel, or anyone else for that matter. He wants to trust him, feels _compelled_ to trust him. Michael means well with him, he feels, has a sense of belonging that is hard to ignore in this cold, hostile world. But it only makes sense now he knows what it means.

“So, that’s why you brought me back? Why wait so long for it?”

“I thought we could manage without you. That I could spare you the pain of being put back in this place only to give up your existence for me. But this has gone on for too long. Too much has already been lost. I need you, Dean.”

He speaks so openly, with clear regret for the fate he wants Dean to accept, that the human once again feels he has to trust him, has to give him anything he wants. And that’s exactly what makes him move back. (He wonders if Lucifer’s vessel felt like this, if Lucifer said ‘Please’ and all doubts left the guy’s mind.)

“Who’s the guy you’re wearing?” he asks. “What about him? He got the same speech?”

He half expects Michael to look down at himself like people do when a spot of ketchup on their shirt is brought to their attention, but the archangel only smiles.

“This vessel is not ideal, but it’s close enough. However, he knew he was not the first choice. This boy wasn’t involved in the war like you are and didn’t care for it as much. I offered a reward for his help and he accepted.”

“So you made a deal? I thought that was a demon-thing to do.”

Michael only snorts – a harsh and disgusted sound.

“If you can just take some random guy and make do with him, I really don’t get why this has been going on for so long,” Dean muses. “I’ve been told only certain people are compatible with archangels, and yet here you are.” He can’t even begin to express how tired he is with constantly being lied to and misled. But his anger doesn’t direct at Michael, who was not the one to make him think he was the only one who mattered.

“Not just certain people,” Michael corrects him. “Certain bloodlines. You both come from the same line, so you both have the potential to carry me. It is stronger in you. That’s why I need you now, Dean.”

But Dean’s mind stopped at ‘from the same line’. “Who is your vessel?”

“Your brother Adam,” Michael replies without any of the hesitation Castiel shows before answering just about any question posed to him, and especially those relating in any way, shape or form to Dean’s brother. “He was willing to accept me a long time ago.”

“Oh,” is all Dean says as he looks at the body before him with new interest. He thinks he sees a resemblance to the man he’s seen in the mirror so long ago in the large eyes and the dark blonde hair, but most of all he thinks that this boy, Adam, that he is too young. Somehow he feels his brother shouldn’t be that much younger than him, but he doesn’t know until he remembers what Castiel said: that his mother died when he was but four years old. So he can’t have a brother that young.

And then he thinks that he doesn’t know much longer he’s gone on after Adam said Yes and accepted the fate that should have been his (and somehow, Dean feels guilty about that, as if this was a fate he should have protected his brother from), how much he aged when Adam didn’t. So he looks at the painfully young boy before him and thinks _‘Why not?’_ and doesn’t know why the echo of memories usually accompanying revelations about his past just doesn’t come.

“My brother,” he finally says. “The one who freed Lucifer from his cage.”

Michael smiles thinly. “I see, Castiel told you things.”

“Seems a strange choice for your vessel.”

“Like I said, he wasn’t my first choice,” Michael reminds him with a hint of humour. “Unfortunately, the choices within your family are… limited.”

Dean nods. “Cas told me I was pretty much the last one left.”

“Unfortunately, that’s true,” Michael confirms, and adds, “You should ask Castiel what blame he carries for that.”

Dean goes still. “What do you mean by that?”

“Did he ever tell you why everyone is after him? Why you have to run with him even when we could keep you safe?”

“I don’t know – I figured it was because he disapproved of you wearing me like a suit.” And the resulting potential end of the world. It isn’t like Cas cares what happened to Dean, as such. He’s made pretty clear that he doesn’t like Dean very much. “But so far he’s been kinda awful at answering questions.”

“I expected as much. What has he told you so far?”

“You don’t know?”

“I’m not watching you all day long, Dean,” Michael informs him. “In fact, I don’t even know where you are. Castiel has hidden you from me a long time ago.”

Dean isn’t as surprised as maybe he should have been. He already guessed that nothing about this conversation was real. Cas sleeping happily through it is a dead giveaway. However, if this is a dream, he is a little worried about the demons that might be sneaking up to him this very moment.

Michael looks around. “Do you know where this place is?”

“Don’t you? Cas said you destroyed it.”

“I don’t see what you see, Dean, not really,” Michael says mildly. “Castiel’s protection is too strong still. Even I have not been able to remove it.”

Dean frowns doubtfully. “Seems pretty good for an angel all out of fairy dust.”

“The warding is old. He was much stronger at the time he created it. Stronger than an angel of his standing ever had a right to be.”

Dean wonders if it’s really anger he hears in the archangel’s voice. Rage over being defeated by a lower angel’s spell. Seems pretty petty to him, but it might be his imagination, so he doesn’t comment on it.

“So you need me to tell you where we are to find us,” he says instead. “Forgive me if I find that a little bit suspicious.”

Michael raises his eyebrows in mild confusion. “What is suspicious about me wanting to find you and keep you safe?”

“It’s suspicious because Castiel is running from you, and apparently he’s been quite successful so far. And I am just so conveniently with him, so if you find me, you find him.”

Michael sighs. “Consider who you’re talking about. What has Castiel done to win your trust?”

“Nothing. But neither have you, except I kind of want to trust you, and where I come from that’s a sure sign not to do that.” But it almost physically hurts to say the words. It’s wrong, what he’s doing, but Dean can’t help himself. “All I know is that someone’s lying to me here. And before I got some proper and reliable answers to base my own judgement on, I’m not going to tell anyone anything.” And then Dean holds his breath. Waits for an archangel’s wrath, the kind that turns cities into dust, if Michael has the power right now or not. He’s sure, for Dean he could summon it, imperfect vessel or not.

But Michael only smiles. He seems, at best, vaguely amused, which confuses Dean, because he’s sure Michael doesn’t get denied often. Except, of course, that he himself must have a history of refusing him, else Michael wouldn’t be wearing Adam like a giant condom now.

“I see. I must admit, I expected no less.” Michael stands from where he was sitting on a rock, except of course he’s not here and therefore wasn’t sitting anywhere. (Dean, briefly, wonders if it would have any effect if he kicked him now.) “Very well. I will continue to look out for you. I’ll know if you need my help. Whether you believe me or not, I wish you no harm.”

“Goes without mention. You’re after my ass, after all.” Dean nearly winces when he hears his own words. A little voice in the back of his head whispers he can’t talk like that to a fucking archangel, and he’d think it belonged to his mother if his mother hadn’t died when he was four, so he surely doesn’t have enough memories of her to know what she’d think about angels. Also, the voice sounds suspiciously male.

And pissy.

“It’s more of what you’ll do to the rest of the planet I’m worried about,” he adds, but by the time he finishes the sentence, the archangel is already gone.

“Great,” Dean mutters. He blinks, and it’s like something’s shifted. He never had the impression of being in a dream, but only now does he become aware of the cold again, of the taste of dust and dirt that never seems to leave his tongue, of the absence of sound. Even the light breeze that has been blowing outside this valley has stilled before nightfall. It’s like even the air tries not to come here if it doesn’t have to.

Dean is well aware of the fact that Michael never explained what happened here, or why.

Other than the first time his personal archangel visited him, when time seemed to go by in a heartbeat and Dean found himself confronted with the morning after just a few exchanged words, this time it seems to have frozen. The sky hasn’t brightened any more than it was when Michael showed up beside him and Cas is still sleeping beside him, as if he didn’t have a care in the world.

 

-

 

The next day, Dean comes to a decision. He’s going to tell Cas about Michael and his visits. He doesn’t trust any of them, but it’ll be interesting to see what Cas has to say about this.

And then, after he’s opened his mouth, he shuts it again. Cas will tell him whatever he thinks will get Dean on his side, will make him see Michael as the enemy because he’s Castiel’s enemy. He certainly won’t give Dean the information he’d need to make his own decision.

For the first time, Dean really wishes he could remember everything.

Castiel seems to have an internal alarm clock. Dean never got to wake him up, the angel just opened his eyes on his own about an hour before the light reached deep enough into the valley to cross it. They skip breakfast and reach the bottom an hour later, just when the last deep shadows recede.

Due to rockfalls, the only road going along the rim of the valley was blocked off long ago, and now Dean wonders if anyone did that on purpose, or if fate is just being a bitch. Because now they have to go right through the town, and the town is the creepiest and saddest thing he’s seen in this new life of his. Because it wasn’t destroyed. It isn’t a pile of rubble. It’s still a town  - a small one, hidden between the hills, with small houses and a few shops, and a main road that might once have been lined with trees. All that is still there, down to the road signs and the name plates on the post boxes.

There’s rust everywhere, and some roofs have crumbled, but it’s only time that slowly destroys this place.

It was the angels that killed it.

The lack of cars in the streets, the way burned out wrecks are piled up to build barricades, the devil’s traps carved into the streets remind Dean that even this town lived through the apocalypse, that the world around was already broken when it died, but there are signs here that life still went on. A table and chairs put on a lawn for a breakfast in the sun. A child’s toy, half buried in the ground.

There are no corpses, not even single, bleached bones remaining. Perhaps, if they entered the houses, they would find them there, everyone retreated inside to hide from the inevitable end. They don’t enter the houses.

“The town was protected by the hills and unimportant enough to be spared when the larger cities came down,” Cas explains as they walk down the main road, and that’s all he says for a long time. Only when they take the wrong turn for the third time and have to walk back to find a way that is not blocked, Dean makes a comment and is told that Castiel has never been to this place before. He has no connection to it – it was chosen because it was within viewing distance of his hideout when the angels tried to lure him out, and he has avoided coming here ever since.

Somehow it makes the deadness that surrounds them even more chilling. The people who lived here were doomed completely by chance.

It soon becomes obvious why Castiel wanted to hit the town the moment the light allowed it. The town isn’t big, but still big enough to need a couple of hours to cross it, especially considering all the retours they have to take, and light down here doesn’t last much longer than those few hours. In the dark, they would get lost even more, and Dean doesn’t even want to think about spending the night here, or really, even a minute longer than he absolutely has to. He can’t imagine Cas wants it either.

The town is in a relatively sheltered area, offers intact buildings and is already warded against anything but angels. It would make sense for other people to migrate here, but no one ever did. Dean doesn’t even bother to wonder why.

The hills on the opposite side of the valley get closer, but Dean and Castiel are still lost between the buildings when the sky begins to darken. Going through the buildings instead of looking for a way around them might save time, but neither of them even suggests it – not even when the hypothetical possibility of being stuck here in total darkness becomes a very real possibility. They just speed up their steps, trying to find the main street again, after they had to leave it two hours ago to go around obstacles blocking their way.

They make it out with the last light, the shadows of the buildings growling longer as if following them out of the town. As they climb up the slope of the mountain, stumbling and occasionally falling over rocks, Dean thinks of the demons chasing them, the ones that forced them to take this way, and thinks that the town is warded against them. That it is the safest place for the night.

He doesn’t say it. It doesn’t _feel_ safe.

It’s dark by the time they stop, but it’s the normal, grey darkness of night, not this black shadow of something else. Dean looks back, reluctantly, and sees the darkness pooling below them, like a lake.

The cave Castiel hid in all those years ago is supposed to be on this side of the valley. Dean wonders if it’s still there, if they’re going to stay there.

As it turns out, the entire hill is lined with caves, some deeper than others, some too unstable to spend the night. They pick one, and Dean’s pretty sure his angelic friend has never been inside it before.

Only when he sinks down to the hard ground, stretching his aching legs away from his body, does he realise that they haven’t stopped for food or water all day. He still doesn’t feel hungry now. But he accepts the water bottle Cas hands him and drinks greedily, wondering how much longer until they’ll find another source of water. Two days to cross this area, Cas said. This was the first.

“Michael came to me last night,” Dean says, perhaps only to break the silence. His voice sounds unnaturally loud in the nearly complete darkness of the cave. They’re too far inside for the grey shimmer that lingers under the sky at night to reach them. So Dean can’t see Castiel’s reaction. He can only sit there and wait until Castiel answers.

“Ah,” he finally says, and that is all.

“He wanted to know where we are. He said he wanted to keep me safe.”

“Did you tell him?”

“No. I guess I might’ve if I wasn’t with you, but I don’t know if he’d be half as interested in my location then.”

In the dark, he hears Cas’ hoarse laugh. “Don’t worry about that. They aren’t trying to capture me, not like this.”

“I thought they were looking for something you’ve hidden rather desperately.”

“The do, but they have been for a while. And they know that they can’t make me tell them. They already tried that.”

Dean is silent while he tries not to imagine what that entails, and fails. “He told me about his vessel,” he says. “Adam.”

He senses, more than sees, Castiel nod. “Your brother.”

“He really is, then?” Somehow it seems hard to believe. Perhaps it’s because whenever he looks at Castiel, the angel is familiar, his shape fitting into an empty spot in his memory. There was no such recognition with Adam. He doesn’t call to Dean’s memory any more than Pam did, or Jena.

“You share the same father.”

“That would explain it,” Dean hears himself muttering.

“Explains what?”

“Hm?” Dean looks up, sees nothing but darkness. He’s barely been aware of speaking in the first place. “Oh. I was just confused, a little, because Adam looks so much younger than me, and you said my mother died when I was four, so the age difference shouldn’t be this big.” He shrugs. “It was just something that bothered me, ‘s all.”

For a long moment he doesn’t think Castiel is going to say anything in return. Then he hears him shift beside him, hears the rustle of clothes. “I see.”

What exactly does that mean? Dean wants to ask, because it seems like there’s something more that isn’t being said. Like Cas is keeping something important from him again, but he thinks it would be wrong to ask, here. And then he wonders why he thinks he has to be considerate of any feelings Castiel might have in the face of this place – Cas was the one who sacrificed these people, after all. He accepted this guilt. It was the angels who killed all those people, but it was Cas who let it happen. No matter how ruthless they were, Dean knows that they keep their promises. If they said they would have stopped the murder for Castiel to come out and give them what they wanted, they would have.

“What is it they want from you?” Dean asks the darkness. “What’s so damn important that you would watch this happen and do nothing?” And perhaps that’s a little less tactful than just inquiring about his brother, but he can’t help himself.

Castiel’s voice, when he speaks, is as dark as the cave around them. “We will not discuss this here.”

“Where else, if not here?” Deans spits back. The day has been long and more nerve-wrecking than an eventless day has any right to be. The tension is getting to him, needs an outlet. “You could have saved these people. What was so fucking important that you didn’t? Because if the fate of the world didn’t depend on it? It wasn’t worth it.”

“The world does depend on it,” Cas says, an intensity in his voice that burns through the darkness, and a part of Dean is perversely glad to hear him sound so alive. “And more important than that, I made a promise to protect this. I will protect it, not matter what. I will make any sacrifice that is required of me to keep this safe.”

“You made a promise to whom?”

Castiel hesitates so long before he answers that Dean knows what it’s going to be before he speaks the words.

“To you.”

“Then what. Is. It?” he asks, very slowly, his teeth grinding. “I’ve got a fucking right to know!”

“Yes, you do. But not here. Not now.”

“Why not?”

“Because you don’t trust me. And you don’t understand, not yet. You don’t know how important it is!”

“Well, End-of-the-World level seems pretty damn important to me.”

“It’s got _nothing_ to do with that,” Castiel hisses. “Nothing!”

And Dean’s stomach clenches like it hasn’t in a long time. Like he’s going to be sick again, and he wants to get out, get away from Cas and his secret, but instead he reaches out, feels his hands clench around neck of the angel’s shirt and feels Castiel’s breath on his face as he draws him near.

“Tell me!” he hisses.

“You are beginning to try my patience.” Castiel’s voice is hard, his forehead so close to Dean’s the human can feel the other’s hair brushing his skin. Dean feels Castiel’s tension, mingling with his own, and feels like the angel is a bomb about to go off. And he can’t help but push, add to the tension, because it’s better than the silence they walked through and the things he isn’t told. Even though he knows the blast will hit him full force when it happens.

“You’ve long since busted mine,” he snaps back. “What, you think you are on some sort of charity journey here: help the poor revived idiot? I think not! Whatever you’re doing, you have your own agenda, and I bet it has something to do with me being Michael’s vessel. You keep telling me not to say yes, but so far all I have as a reason is what you tell me and that? Honestly, it isn’t worth a lot.”

“I told you, you are my friend! It’s the _only_ reason I came for you. We have hoped for a long time that you would return, and they knew it. _That’s_ the reason you were put back here. Michael doesn’t need you, not right now. The angels sent you here because they knew I would come for you. They think I’ll lead you to what they want so desperately. They’re just using you, Dean. They always have. I came anyway, so stop doubting me!”

“That, right there, is the same as always! You tell me something, I’m expected to believe it without question! How can I not doubt you, you son of a bitch? Michael tells me one thing, you tell me another, but you know what? I’m more inclined to believe _him_. At least he’s given me some answers without me having to ask ten thousand times!” Dean takes a deep breath. “You’re not a fucking Samaritan, Cas!”

“No. I’m merely keeping a promise.”

“Which you won’t tell me about, even though it apparently was to me – if that’s even true.” They’re still far, far too close to each other. “Fuck you, Cas! There is no fucking reason why you shouldn’t tell me what the hell it is that you’re protecting. It’s not like I could betray you by telling Michael because everyone but me already knows.”

“We will talk about this another time. You’re not able to understand it yet. You’ve missed too much.”

“Yeah, because I died in your stupid war. So how about you cut me a little slack here and just show _me_ a little trust? You’re asking for that a lot, but you’re not showing any trust yourself. And then you won’t even tell me what I’ve done to be so untrustworthy.”

“Many things have happened. This is not the place or the time.”

“You know, Cas, I think it’s never going to be the right place and time with you. We get away from here, and then? Where do we go next? We just keep wandering around, and you keep promising you’ll tell me everything once we’re getting somewhere. I don’t even fucking know where we _are_!”

“Michael might not be going to make a move before you happen to know where what he wants is, but I’d rather not have him monitor us all the time.”

“You seem to assume that the first thing I’ll do is tell him. Thanks for the vote of confidence.”

“So far you haven’t done anything to prove I can trust you.” Castiel’s voice is cold but Dean can feel the tension in his body, hears his breath, loud and harsh and just waiting to snap.

“Of course I haven’t! How would I do that? You’ve never given me enough trust for me to even have a _chance_ to betray you and show that I won’t do it.”

“And I never will,” Cas hisses, suddenly hostile, suddenly far too personal. His own hands find Dean’s shirt in the dark and pull him even closer so he can spit his words right in his face. “Because that’s what your brother did. When no one else would take that chance, he believed in you and gave you the choice not to betray us. And you did!”

He lets Dean go after that, and Dean’s own hands fall away as he moves back, brings space between them. He had to push, he had to know, but he still doesn’t, except he kind of does and his heart is beating wildly somewhere in his throat.

“What did I do?” he asks hoarsely.

Castiel is calmer now, pulled together, but his voice is still hard as steel when he says, “You said Yes. For the last two hundred years you have been Michael’s vessel.” He takes a deep breath. “And you killed your brother.”


	3. Chapter 3

Dean stumbles to his feet so he can take a step back. He can’t get this into his brain because it is already in there. Just hearing those words makes him realise that it is true. He said yes a long time ago, and now he can almost taste the word on his tongue.

For the first time he is grateful for the darkness that hides Castiel’s face, and his own. “But Adam…”

“Adam was resurrected from death not long ago to take your place. You never died, Dean, not this time. You were just gone.”

Castiel’s voice is softer now, as though he regrets having told Dean anything. Truth be told, Dean regrets it too. “Then Lucifer…”

“Lucifer’s vessel never consented. It was lost a long time ago. He is making do with replacements, barely. Michael could win the war in one swift strike, but he intends to play this by the book. Follow his father’s plan. He won’t confront his brother unless he’s a worthy opponent.”

It’s almost a minute before Dean finds his voice again, and the first thing he says is, “I have to get out.”

“It’s too early to move on yet,” Castiel tells him but Dean stumbles towards the exit anyway, led by the faintest shimmer of lesser darkness. Like a light at the end of a tunnel. ( _“It’s hellfire, Dean.”_ ) He would have laughed at the random picture, but his voice seems to be gone.

“Just a minute, okay?” he forces out, and perhaps Cas tells him that it isn’t safe, but he’s already outside, and honestly he doesn’t give a shit.

The darkness of the valley is too close, but he can’t stop staring at it. He thinks he should hate himself now, be disgusted, feel guilty, but mostly he feels nothing at all. Shock, perhaps. And anger at Cas for lying to him. Michael, too. They told him he’d been dead, that he’d died a hero…

 _‘No one’s told you that,’_ his mind whispers unasked. _‘They told you you’ve been gone, and you drew the conclusion yourself.’_

Which is true, but the fact remains that “You were gone for two centuries” only leaves so much room for interpretation. They knew what he believed and let him believe it, both of them.

Turning his back to the valley, Dean starts climbing up the hill, away from the cave. He can’t bother with Cas now. He wants to be somewhere else. The thought of calling Michael crosses his mind and makes him laugh.

Destroyed cities. Dust and rubble. And he thought it was Lucifer who did that. He thought that when Castiel spoke of his friend who had never, never given in, he meant him.

Now he knows what the angel meant when he said that Dean had given up.

But a part of him wonders if he really did. If he really just betrayed everyone, or if his decision was motivated by more than that. Perhaps…

Perhaps it’s really been for the best.

Hell, he doesn’t even know what the world looked like that day. What thoughts were going through his head. Perhaps he had his reasons, and perhaps doing it, despite the consequences, was better than not doing it. Perhaps the world would be off even worse if he hadn’t.

Perhaps he really did doom half the world, but perhaps he also saved the other half.

Castiel’s view of it leaves no room for interpretation. Neither does Michael’s. Between the guy calling him a traitor and the guy calling him a hero… well.

He finds himself thinking, suddenly, of his brother (and then he thinks of Adam and wonders why it still doesn’t feel like it’s the same thing).

He killed his brother. Was that what Cas said? He killed his brother and then Adam was brought back to life so he could take Dean’s place. So much makes sense now. But he doesn’t know how he killed Adam in the first place and why. Was it him, or was it Michael? He has to go back and ask Cas, but he doesn’t want to. He just wants to be alone and stop thinking for the rest of the night. And if the demons find him and drag him to the fucking devil, well, right now he doesn’t really care.

 

-

 

“What happened?”

They have been walking for seven hours or more. It feels like more, but Dean’s become good at judging time by the subtle changes in the light as the day progresses. They left with the first rays of morning light, as soon as they could see enough to climb safely. Dean never got back inside; he spent the night outside without sleeping. And Cas left him alone until morning, but Dean’s sure he didn’t sleep either.

Neither of them has eaten in two days. Dean is hungry, very much so, but Cas has the food and Dean won’t ask for it.

“Cas, what happened? Why did I say yes? Why did I kill my fucking brother? Answer me!”

Cas keeps walking. For too many days Dean’s seen mostly his back as he leads the way and Dean can only run after him. Always asking. Never getting something worth his breath, and when he’s given some truths, he’s left hanging with them. “Cas!”

“We’re in Georgia,” is what Cas says in reply. It confuses Dean until he realises that this is sort of an apology, a bit of information he could use to harm them if he gave it to Michael. Not really useful, because Georgia is big and Michael won’t come for them anyway if there was any truth in what Castiel told him, but a little sign acknowledging that maybe Dean’s not going to betray him the first chance he gets. It makes him angry.

“I don’t give a fuck where we are,” he says harshly. “I want to know what happened to my brother.” His stomach nearly lurches. “Did I really kill him? Why would I do that? What did he _do_?”

Dean sees Cas’ hand clench around the strap of his bag, but his voice continues to be calm, almost tired. “It wasn’t you, Dean. It was Michael, using your body.”

“God, Cas!” It’s both a groan and a sigh of relief. “How can you say it like that, like I murdered my own brother in cold blood? You can’t go and throw something like that at a guy with no memories!”

“Perhaps. I’m sorry.” But Cas doesn’t sound sorry, not really. “But it was you who consented. And because of you Michael took your body and killed your brother. It would not have happened without you. I was angry.”

Dean thinks there must be more to it. As if this wasn’t already enough.

“Why would Michael want to kill him? Is it because he started the apocalypse?”

If possible, the thin hand grabs the strap even tighter. Dean thinks Cas is going to rip it off, but his voice remains as calm and steady as before. “It has to do with that, yes.” And then, in a voice that reflects pain and pleading, “Dean…”

Dean sighs, accepting that he has to offer a little kindness in return, no matter how he feels right now, because he doesn’t know if he’ll survive pushing Cas into another fight. “So, where are we going?”

The sky is beginning to darken and the vegetation is slowly, tentatively returning. Dean even _feels_ better, with every step they take, even though his feet hurt and the hunger is killing him. It feels like they are leaving a nightmare.

“There is a shelter where I used to live for a while,” Cas tells him. “It is not the one I was originally aiming for, but it will do. I have food stored there. A river is nearby. We can rest there for a few days.”

Rest sounds wonderful. Dean thinks that perhaps he can make more sense of all of this if he gets a good night’s sleep for once, or even if he got through a day without feeling cold. “How much further is it?”

“Two days.”

Two days isn’t so bad, not after all the walking they’ve already done. But Dean is so ready to stop wandering and finally get somewhere that he just rolls his eyes and groans. “Fantastic.”

They find a creek just before it gets too dark to move on and decide to rest there. Castiel wanders off briefly to finish the edges of the rather big devil’s trap he’s drawn as protection around their camp while Dean fills their bottles with fresh, clean water. The little stream is the first movement they’ve come across in days.

He wants to ask what they are going to do after they leave Castiel’s shelter, but is afraid that the answer is going to be ‘more walking’. Sometimes he feels that the total extent of the angel’s planning is indeed to run around until the two parties in this war get bored and fuck off.

They eat what is left of their supplies, and afterwards Dean, no longer hungry but far from feeling sated, lies back and stares up to the sky. He imagines the stars, can almost see them. Remembers the constellations, and can almost hear a voice telling him about them, but it slips away again, leaving him aching inside and longing for a night sky that was lost long ago.

It’s funny that he can remember something he has never seen in his current life. That he can remember the stars, but not what his mother looked like.

Cas remains sitting, remains alert, and Dean allows himself to drift. He doesn’t think of Michael, for once. He doesn’t wonder if he has doomed more people than he has saved. “Cas,” he says after a while, quietly. “Tell me about life here. What’s it like, for everyone?”

The topic seems harmless enough, and as he hoped, after a few seconds, Cas begins to tell him. About the settlements, about how there are still enough children for new communities to be created every now and then. About daily life that lacks anything technological because power went out long ago and was never recovered, but isn’t all that different in theory from what it’d been during Dean’s days. People still have jobs – just the work has changed. They still have things they do for their enjoyment and they still love their families.

They go out sometimes and don’t come back. Sometimes a camp’s wards get damaged and before they notice it and fix them demons come and take over the bodies of every single person living there. There are so many demons on Earth now, and so few humans to possess.

There’s trade of goods and information between the settlements but with no remote way of communicating, information travels slowly and it’s dangerous to go on even a short journey outside the boundaries of home.

Inside some of the large buildings that remained intact, people keep cattle, and between their houses or around the settlements, they grow fruit, vegetables and corn.

There are not many plants, let alone edible plants, that can survive with so little sunlight and so little rain, but it’s enough. People adapted. They always do.

“Is it always so cold?”

Castiel thinks about the answer before he gives it. “It is, now. Before, for a long time, it was very warm. It will change again.”

“Like seasons, just longer,” Dean guesses and gets something like a smile in return.

“The temperature is never so extreme that it would be dangerous for a human to be exposed to it for a while. But it is always too hot or too cold to be comfortable.”

Kind of like this war, Dean thinks. It didn’t kill humanity completely yet, but it certainly likes to make it suffer.

“How about you?” he asks. “Where did you live before you decided to become a hermit?”

“We lived in various camps. Worked with hunters a lot. The camp you saw earlier was home base for a few years. We did our best to protect those people, while looking for a way to get Michael out of you. But it wasn’t… easy. Most of the time. People are difficult.”

“You tried to get Michael out? Is that even possible?”

“No,” Cas says at once. “But we had to try. It was…” He trails off.

“I didn’t think you’d want me back after that,” Dean admits.

“I didn’t, not always.” Wow. One day Dean will have to let his angel know how much he appreciates the open honesty. “Not in the beginning. I was… embittered, over your betrayal. But my friend, he needed you back. He didn’t have much else to fight for, so I indulged him. But in the end, he stopped seeking out Michael. I don’t think he ever gave up on you, but he avoided Michael where he could.”

“Why?”

“Michael did…things, while in your body, that he would rather not associate with you. Neither did I.”

Something tells Dean he doesn’t want to know.

“Why did I say yes?”

Castiel sighs. “I can only guess.”

“I never explained myself to you?”

“You didn’t even warn us. You wanted to sneak away and just do it. It was thanks to your brother that we found you in time. We tried to talk you out of it.”

“But…?”

“But you didn’t listen. You thought it was the best thing to do. You thought Lucifer would get his vessel and then Michael would have to be strong enough to stop him. You saw it as saving half the world, not as killing the other half. You already knew Adam was an alternative for Michael and wanted to spare him that fate.” Out of the corner of his eye, Dean sees Cas’ silhouette shrug. “You gave many reasons, didn’t listen to any of ours. Most of all, though, I think you were just tired. Fate has loaded a lot of responsibility on your shoulders. Sacrificing half of humanity or risk dooming all of it – it was a heavy burden to carry.”

Funny how he seems to make excuses for Dean now, when before he was full of blame. Perhaps he thinks he has to make amends for telling Dean in the first place when he thought he shouldn’t know.

And then Dean thinks that just because Cas is calm as he speaks, it doesn’t mean that he’s really arguing in Dean’s favour. So far he’s basically told him that he wasn’t strong enough to bear what was asked of him and ran away.

( _“You gave up.”_ )

“You seemed pretty damn pissed earlier,” he puts his thoughts into words.

“I still am. I will never not be angry.” Again with the honesty. Why can’t Cas be as straightforward when it comes to practical questions with answers that don’t make Dean feel like a piece of shit? “I fell from grace willingly because I did not wish for the apocalypse to happen and thought you were the answer. I fell for you – you have never been able to understand what that means. When you said yes you threw away everything I fell for.”

“You believed in me,” Dean realises. “And I let you down.”

“You let everyone down.” And wow, that really makes it better. “We locked you up and tried to talk sense into you. You escaped. I found you again, and we locked you up again. It wasn’t just fear of what would happen if Michael got you that made us do that. We all loved you, Dean. We wanted to keep you from destroying yourself. And from destroying our faith in you. We needed you.”

“You really know how to make a guy feel good about himself,” Dean mutters. “If you had me locked in, how did I do it, then? Seems to me you couldn’t have been that eager to keep me if you were such lousy guards.”

“Like I said, your brother believed in you. More than me. More than anyone. He didn’t think you could go through with it. He took you along when we went to face Michael. I didn’t think you were worth his trust. You proved me right.”

Something in his words – perhaps the way he says it, perhaps a lost memory stirring at the mention – make Dean want to cry. He doesn’t feel ashamed, or guilty. He just feels sad.

He wants to argue his case. That all of what Castiel told him is true he doesn’t doubt. He feels it is true, and what he was told about his motivations goes along with what he thought about consenting since he knew he was a vessel. What he wants to protest is the accusation of having given up because he was too weak. Because he was selfish and put his own peace over anyone else’s.

He wants to argue his case, wants to defend himself and present Cas with the reasons why letting Michael in might not be the worst thing ever, but in the face of the destruction around them and with the angel’s view of things he guesses it wouldn’t go over too well. This is not the time for another fight, informative as those sometimes are. Dean is tired. He wants to sleep, and he doesn’t want to dream. He doesn’t want to think. He wants to silence the voice that keeps talking of handing control over to an archangel as a good way to escape the struggle of this life. Especially if there was no other way and death wasn’t an option because he would have just been brought back…

No one’s ever told him that, but somehow he knows that’s how it was. It is a singularly depressing thought.

After having been denied even that escape for long enough, there might come a point when anyone might be willing to pay any price for some rest. Dean just hopes that this isn’t really what he did. With no memories dating further back than a few days and not suffering anything but cold feet and an aching back from sleeping on rocks for too long, he would find it hard to forgive himself either.

 

-

 

It’s in the middle of the night when Castiel wakes Dean up, and at first Dean thinks it’s his turn to keep watch. This is the first time Cas actually has to wake him – usually he gets woken by dreams he can’t remember and takes Castiel’s place without a word, and a part of him is convinced that if he didn’t wake up on his own, Cas would just let him sleep through the night. Yet Cas is waking him now, but he does so with a hand on his shoulder and the other hand covering Dean’s mouth, and Dean knows it’s more than just fatigue driving the fallen angel.

“What is it?” he asks when the hand is removed, his voice hardly even a whisper.

“Demons. Many.”

The two words make Dean press back against the rock behind which they’d set camp, instinctively, without really noticing. Cas shifts, his wide eyes trained at the darkness stretching before them, his body between the open land and Dean. (Perhaps that’s instinct, too.)

Dean strains to hear voices, footfalls, anything, but all he hears is the soft murmur of the slowly flowing creek. “Do you hear them? How close are they?”

“I can’t hear them. They are nearby, but I don’t know how near.”

“How do you even know they are here?”

There’s hesitation, and reluctance, as if what Cas tells him is actually a secret. “I sense it.”

“I didn’t know you could, without seeing them.”

“I can’t. But I sense the angel that is near us,” Castiel tells him without turning. “Lucifer is with them,” he explains. “And he never goes alone.”

 

-

 

They run, this time, rather than walk. Their pace hasn’t sped up much, but there is a sense of urgency to it that wasn’t there before. Cas doesn’t speak anymore, and Dean asks no more questions. For the moment they are united by their common goal: avoid capture.

They don’t make good progress. There is no way to avoid these demons like they avoided the ones from the nest they came across before. They could be everywhere, anywhere, and this time they know Dean and Cas are around. Dean is sure of it. Their presence here is no coincidence.

What Cas told him about what the demons will do to him if he is caught doesn’t leave him alone. If they get him, they’ll make sure Michael can’t use him anymore – and considering the losses they have suffered through the archangel while he was wearing Dean like a cheap suit, he can imagine that they’d like some revenge on top of it all, to sweeten things a little.

They’re out of food, but Dean lacks appetite in the face of the situation anyway. By midday they come across a group of people and while they look normal enough to him, Dean wouldn’t take the chance, even without Cas signalling that they are possessed. Dean’s hand clenches around his gun in an instinctive gesture, fully knowing that the simple weapon offers no protection and wishing for a gun that could kill anything.

There are no rocks around to hide behind, just some pathetic looking trees in a meadow of yellow grass. They lie down between the trees, in the high grass, and Dean has never felt so visible. But the demons pass them by, not twenty yards away, without ever knowing they were there.

Cas can recognize them as demons when he sees them but he can’t sense them from a distance. He can sense Lucifer but that doesn’t help at all, since the devil doesn’t need to go after them personally.

The devil. For the first time Dean becomes aware that they’re up against the _devil_ , and it seems so big and hopeless that he can almost understand why his past self threw down his weapons and invited Michael in. What chance can they have against fucking Satan?

But he keeps quiet, and he doesn’t call for any angelic help. All he needs is Castiel to guide him through this – yet he can’t help but wonder if this is going to be his life now. Running from demons. Running from angels. Fearing for his life and sanity and soul.

It’s not until night that their luck runs out. They don’t sleep, can’t afford to, but they also can’t risk moving on and stumbling around blindly and bringing attention to themselves by the noise they make. So they sit huddled together in the dark, at the edge of a cliff, the water of the river running below. It’s too far away for them to reach. They’re keeping warm by pressing together for the first time ever and listening to the dark. The dark listens back. Dean feels vulnerable and he thinks he can’t deal with this situation without having figured himself out first. There are devil’s traps carved into the earth all around them, but they do nothing to make him feel safe.

He’s right not to. Devil’s traps only protect from demons, after all.

Suddenly there are footsteps, and both Dean and Cas turn to see three shapes peel out of the darkness. One man, two women. They come towards them with sure steps. Dean lifts his gun towards them despite knowing it’ll be useless. He braces himself for the moment they reach the devil’s traps and get caught if they don’t notice them in time and stop. Maybe he and Cas can exorcise them, save a couple of poor bastards from possession.

But the three of them just keep walking. Into the traps and beyond, as if they didn’t even exist.

The sound of a gun being fired right beside him is the loudest sound Dean has heard in his remembered life. It tears though the night and he imagines it as a signal light that shines in the darkness, telling everyone who cares where they are.

Dean only knows who the shot was aimed at because one of the women glances briefly down at the hole in her far too thin shirt. When she looks up, her expression is of mild reprimand.

“Castiel,” she says with some indignation. “Seriously?”

A glance to his side reveals that Castiel dropped the useless gun. One second later a long, silver blade slips out of the sleeve of his jacket and into his hand.

At the sight of it, all three strangers stop, frowns and vague worry on their faces as Castiel adopts a defensive pose. “I see you kept that,” the man says. One second later an identical blade appears in his own hand. “But, look, so did I!”

Castiel hisses, an almost feral sound, and suddenly Dean wants nothing more than to be far away from these people and the fight he is about to witness.

“Don’t be silly, little Castiel,” the second woman says. “Did it escape your attention that we outnumber you? There’s not a trace of heaven’s grace left in you to fight with. And dear Dean is more than useless.” She turns to look at Dean, the first time one of them actively acknowledges his presence, and purses her lips. “No offense.”

Dean actually does feel offended, so he doesn’t grace that with an answer.

Beside him, Cas looks like a deer caught in the headlight. He raises his blade a little higher, take as step back as the other armed man steps closer to him. “You will not kill me,” he says angrily. “Your master does not allow it.”

“True. But I am allowed to wound you. In fact, it’s been encouraged.” All three of them step closer and this time both Cas and Dean step back. “And you don’t need arms and legs to talk to us. I don’t think I’ll be punished for cutting them off. It’ll make things so much easier for us if you can’t run away anymore.”

But for the moment, Cas still has legs, and he can still run. He just has nowhere to go with the enemy in front of him and the cliff in his back.

He also still has arms, and he can throw things. What exactly it is that he throws at the man in front of him, Dean doesn’t know. He only sees the result when it collides with the guy’s chest: There is bright light, and a scream, and when Dean can see again, the man has thrown off the remains of his shirt and his naked chest is covered in angry red marks. The two women have retreated a step, but they get closer again, their own weapons drawn. They’re advancing, but even they must have been blinded, because it is only after a couple of steps that they stop, and hiss in anger.

Dean doesn’t have to look. He heard the splash over the guys screams, but a part of him can’t believe that Cas would leave him behind like this. He wonders for a moment if he’s expected to jump after him into the river he can’t even _see_ in the darkness, just hoping that the water is deep enough and he’ll miraculously miss any rocks.

Thinking about the alternative, it might be the better to take that chance than wait here and see what those guys will do with him. He doesn’t know if they have use for _his_ arms and legs, but he, personally, would like to keep them.

The two women, accepting that Castiel has slipped through their grasp, turn their attention to Dean, who instinctively takes another step back. Another step closer to the edge, over which Cas jumped when he left Dean alone with these guys to save his own sorry hide. Dean still can’t believe it. It’s like his brain is two steps behind everything that happens, and maybe that’s why he isn’t able to make a decision in time, before one of the women is standing behind him and pulls him against her chest rather unromantically with an arm around his neck.

Her grip is like steel.

The man has stopped screaming, and despite the marks lingering on his skin he doesn’t seem hurt anymore. Instead, he seems predominantly pissed. In a second he’s before Dean, his rather large hand grapping Dean’s jaw with bruising force, and Dean comes to the conclusion that jumping blindly into the river would have been the smarter move after all.

“Dean Winchester,” he says. “Not the Winchester I was hoping to meet, but you’ll make an acceptable consolation price.”

Before Dean can ask what he means by that, or beg for his life, the guy raises his hand to Dean’s forehead, and then there is a snap and his vision goes dark.

 

-

 

When he comes to, he’s inside a room. A room with painted walls, a rug on the floor, furniture and a fireplace in which a fire is crackling peacefully. It’s clean and tidy and smells of wood. For a long moment, Dean isn’t sure why all this is in any way remarkable.

He groans when he moves, in anticipation of the headache that usually comes with waking up like this, in an unfamiliar place after being knocked out during an encounter with an enemy. But the headache fails to make an appearance. He feels heavy and a little sluggish, and his feet still carry the pain of forty miles a day, but other than that he’s not feeling any worse than he had before losing consciousness. In fact, he actually feels better, because for the first time in forever, he isn’t cold.

He’s also lying on a proper bed, and compared to this one the bed he slept in at Pam’s place was a bench covered in straw. The covers are soft and they smell good. There are at least three pillows, one more comfortable than the other, and the cover is thick and clean. But he’s lying on the cover, not beneath it, which reminds him that he hasn’t gone to bed here but just been put on it because they had to store him somewhere until he woke up. Still, it beats the floor.

His aching muscles demand he linger in bed, turn over and get a lot of sleep while he can, but his mind finally catches up and makes his body move before it can get any say in the matter.

It’s a moment before he realises that he isn’t alone, and when he finally notices the boy standing beside the fireplace, he is almost certain that he wasn’t there just a second before. Because Dean usually notices people who stand in the room and stare at him, but mostly because the guy is surrounded by an almost visible air of power that screams out his presence to every one of Dean’s senses.

He smiles at Dean, has to look up at him because he can’t be older than fourteen or fifteen and would still have to do a little growing before he could meet him at eye-level. Except that something tells Dean that this boy will never grow another inch. And it isn’t just because of the sickly look to him or the fact that his skin is peeling off his face.

“Dean,” he says, his voice seemingly too deep to fit his body. “It’s good to see you awake. I hope the journey here wasn’t too stressful.”

“Not the last bit, in any case,” Dean admits. He remains sitting on the bed and the boy comes over to him. Even in the light of the fire he looks like a zombie, Dean thinks. Like one of those zombies portrayed in horror movies, not an actual zombie like the ones that sometimes live in people’s basements.

“Who are you?” he asks.

The boy smiles. It looks genuine, almost kind. “Oh, Dean. You know me, don’t you?”

He doesn’t, but he can guess. “Lucifer.”

The boy smiles, as if he’d just been complimented. “In the flesh. Not at my finest, I have to admit, but it’ll do for this conversation.”

“What, so you’re raping children now?” Dean doesn’t really have a right to sound so offended. It’s the devil. Of course he’s raping children.

Even if Lucifer doesn’t see it that way. “Oh, not at all. The boy consented, after all. You should know that I can’t take anyone without their consent.”

“And did you tell him that the flesh would fall off his bones when he let you take him? Did you tell him it’d kill him?”

“Details. What does it matter?” Lucifer shrugs his bony little shoulders. “Consent is consent. You, of all people, should know that.”

“Are you trying to get personal here?” Of course he had to bring up Michael. The big brother who refused to fight him while he was weak and pathetic. “I’m not going to say yes to him just now, if that’s what you were wondering.”

“Oh, I wasn’t. I know I’ll have to wait a little for you to give in again.” And isn’t it great that even Satan finds it in him to look down on Dean? “I know you can’t remember – that’s too bad. I’d like to know if my brother told you beforehand about all he wanted to do with your body while he wore it. Did you know what you were giving consent to? I doubt it. But then, I doubt you really cared.” He lifts his eyebrows, looks at Dean though large eyes. “With this boy, it was the same. I offered. He accepted. End of story.”

Like Michael had offered once. Peace, or justice, or whatever, and Dean had taken it. “What do you want with me? If you came to talk about the good old days, I have to disappoint you – no memories at all.”

“Except you knew me, which I find interesting.” Lucifer does look interested, all open minded and eager to learn more. “But no, that’s not why I had you taken here. Sorry for that, by the way. It’s just that I didn’t think you’d come willingly if I asked you.”

“Didn’t help that your lackeys threatened to cut off my friend’s limbs. Always gives such a bad first impression.”

“Oh, your friend, right. The one who ran and left you behind to be taken. Doesn’t that sting a little?”

It does, but that’s neither here nor there at the moment. Dean is here now and Castiel is not, so Lucifer is the problem he has to deal with right now.

“I can bear it,” he says gracefully and finally gets off the bed, if only for the satisfaction of having the devil look up to him. He hopes that Lucifer doesn’t see how much being in his presence makes his skin crawl, but judging by the smile that creeps on the teen’s face, Lucifer knows. “So, why am I here? Not that I don’t appreciate the hospitality…”

“I want to show you something,” Lucifer says. He makes a beckoning gesture as he leaves the room and Dean thinks he must be crazy, because Satan just told him to follow him, and he actually does.

If only for lack of anywhere else to go.

The halls beyond the room are keeping with the décor. Painted walls, carpets and even a few plants. The countless candles that light the hall are the only reminder that they are in an apocalyptic world without electrical power.

“Where are we, anyway?”

“Oh, I think the city used to be called Atlanta. There’s not much left of it, of course. Michael levelled it a long time ago, but he was so kind to leave a couple of buildings for my faithful servants to make me a comfortable place to stay while I’m in the area.”

Dean can’t help the smirk. “Devil went down to Georgia, huh?”

“Ah.” Lucifer smirks right back. “You remember _that_.”

They’re still in Georgia, then. Since Cas said he could sense Lucifer nearby, they can’t be all that far from where he and Cas have been… separated.

Except that while they were walking the day before, Dean hasn’t seen a city, not even in the distance. So perhaps Castiel’s definition of ‘nearby’ was somewhat vague.

Dean refuses to be worried about his friend. Cas seemed to know what he was doing. Or he was just desperate. Either way, he decided to save himself and didn’t give a second thought about Dean, so he kind of doesn’t deserve Dean’s worry.

Right. Not thinking about that.

Most of the windows they pass are barred shut, but some of them still have glass, and through them Dean can see that they must be in a skyscraper, pretty high up. Below them are the ruins of what must be Atlanta. Most of it lies in rubble, but in between a few buildings remained more or less intact.

The sky is just beginning to brighten, so Dean can’t have been out for very long.

Provided it’s still the same night.

“Are you sure this building is stable?” Dean mutters, not really expecting an answer. He suspects that Lucifer doesn’t appreciate being buried under the remnants of a collapsed sky scraper, but he wants to express somehow that being on the thirtieth floor of a building that has somehow survived a blast that levelled the rest of the city doesn’t appeal to his survival instincts.

To his utter discomfort, Lucifer does answer. “Oh, that’s not much of a concern to me. This body won’t get me though another week anyway. I’ll just find a new one if it’s destroyed.”

Dean thinks that his thoughts must be very obvious on this face, because the fucking devil laughs at him. “Don’t worry, Dean. There’s something in here I’d like to keep safe. So no, the floor won’t break off under your feet. I’m afraid the elevator’s out of order, though.”

Very funny. Who would have thought that Satan has a sense of humour?

Fortunately, they don’t have to get on another floor, because Dean isn’t sure about the state of the stairs. Already, he’s wondering how he’ll get down again – as if he could assume that they’d just let him walk out of here.

The room Lucifer leads him to is smaller than the bedroom, and lit by oil lamps lining the walls. There’s no carpet here, but a colourful, expensive looking rug in the centre that takes up almost half the room. There is no furniture either, except for the table in the middle: a long, narrow thing covered in several blankets.

On top of the blankets is a human, lying flat on his back, not moving. When Dean walks closer, he can see that the man isn’t even breathing. A corpse, then, although the guy must have died recently. Even up close, Dean can make out no sign of decay.

The man is a little younger than him, perhaps in his mid– to late twenties, although it is hard to tell for sure, and the longer Dean looks at him, the more he wonders how he’s been able to make even a guess about his age.

The body is emaciated, almost skeletal, and the face sunken in, the eyes bruised-looking, the lips bloodless. The lines of the man’s face are deep, making him look older than he was. The scars don’t help – most of them are so small and faded that Dean has to look closely to see them at all, but two stand out as white lines against his skin, which is pale in death but used to have a darker shade, as if he’s been out in the sun all the time. (Dean didn’t think anyone could have skin like that in this sun-depraved world.)

One of the scars starts on the sunken cheek, just below the prominent cheekbone, and runs over his jaw under his left ear and half around the back of his neck. The other one starts on his forehead, splits the right eyebrow and goes all the way over the eyelid to end on the cheekbone. The scar is thin and there is no sign of stitches, but the placement of it makes Dean want to lift the lid to see if the eye below is unharmed. He doesn’t, of course, and doesn’t know why he cares. The guy is dead anyway, and Dean didn’t know him.

Probably. It just happens that his hand has taken hold of the dead guy’s hand without consulting him first. The thin hand is limp and cold, scarred and looks a little odd, looks like broken bones that haven’t healed right. Apart from face and hands, every inch of the man’s body is covered in cloth. A dark green shirt that goes strangely well with the man’s long brown hair, wide, soft black pants, even knee-high boots the guy certainly doesn’t have use for anymore. A long, black vest has been put over the shirt and secured around the waist with a board belt made of black leather. All of the fabrics are of a high quality the people outside certainly haven’t ever even heard of. Dean isn’t sure _he_ had heard of some of these.

They seem out of place, surrounding this emaciated, sick-looking corpse.

Dean becomes aware that he’s still holding the dead hand and he puts it back quickly, feeling awkward. Looking up, he sees Lucifer standing on the other side of the table, his gaze on Dean’s hands, a slight smile of his lips and something dark and unreadable in his eyes. Dean straightens and takes a step back, embarrassed. He’s standing before Satan, and he’s feeling _embarrassed_. Something about all this is just weird.

“Whose body is this?” he asks, because clearly, this guy is important to the devil, if the way he’s been dressed and draped up here is anything to go by.

“Mine,” Lucifer says, and Dean has to admit it takes him by surprise.

“Come again?”

Lucifer sighs. “Didn’t you listen to anything told to you? I need a vessel to walk this earth, and this one I have right now… well, it’s not even third or fourth choice. It’s a temporary solution born out of a lack of options. It’ll fall apart shortly, and then I’ll be forced to take another and another. And to be honest, I’m tired of this. Of these weak, disgusting forms that sometimes can’t even bring me through a month.” He walks around the table, lets his fingers trail over the limbs of the dead body in a way that makes Dean uncomfortable. Eventually Lucifer stops and tenderly runs his fingertips over the scars on the corpse’s face, smooths his hair, and the look on his stolen face is nothing but tender. “But this boy, he can carry me forever. He was made for me. My perfect vessel.”

Dean remembers what Castiel told him, once, in passing. It seems so long ago, but the words never left him. The words he once thought were about him. “He never said yes. You need his consent and he never gave it. And you’re stuck in bodies that can’t contain you.”

“Yes, this whole consent thing is a little troublesome at times. I tried to convince him. Make him see reason. God knows I tried. We all did.”

“I can imagine,” Dean says dryly, though he probably can’t.

“You can’t,” Lucifer confirms. “Didn’t take much reasoning to convince _you_ , after all.”

Dean actually has to roll his eyes at that. “Well, my angel didn’t plan to take hell a level upstairs.”

Lucifer only snorts at that. “It’s not so different, in the end. And regardless of what you think, I never hurt him. Not once. But that’s neither here nor there right now, in face of the obvious problem.”

“That he’s dead? If he’s not using the body, why don’t you just take over?”

“Oh Dean, your naiveté is so amusing. How I missed seeing you around. Michael in your flesh never quite had the same entertainment potential.”

“Get to the point.”

“What part of ‘I need his consent’ don’t you understand`? Do you think we would have had to go through so many pains if we could just kill our vessels and take their lifeless flesh? The bodies are just a shape – we need their souls to anchor us in them. Souls equal power in a way you can never understand. And he can’t give his consent if he’s dead.”

Dean tries to get over the image of having spent the last two centuries as a heavenly power-plant. “Then why don’t you just bring him back? Or is that beyond your capability in this form?”

“Don’t be silly. I don’t need any human form at all to reach into hell and draw back a soul, least of all that of my vessel.” Lucifer does sound slightly insulted. Dean doesn’t feel threatened by it, but he can’t stop wondering what would happen if he managed to truly piss him off.

“Then why?”

“Because his soul isn’t in hell. It isn’t in heaven either, before you ask. It isn’t anywhere I could find it. And that makes pulling it back into his body a little bit difficult.”

Dean sees the problem. He doesn’t see what this has to do with him. “Maybe it was destroyed?” he guesses, and suddenly fears that this is his answer: that it is gone because Michael vaporized it.

Lucifer looks at him in mild fascination. “You really don’t know about this, do you?” He sounds almost surprised and Dean rests assured in the knowledge that the devil can’t read his mind – or alternatively is a really good actor. “You can’t destroy a soul, not like that. It’s gone, because somebody took it.”

“Took it?” Dean gets it now. What happened. What Lucifer wants with him, why they were hunting him and… “You think it was Castiel?”

“I _know_ it was Castiel. Everyone knows it was Castiel, which makes Castiel the most wanted creature on any plane of existence. You wouldn’t happen to know where he left it, would you?”

“I don’t even know who this guy is,” Dean points out, and Lucifer smirks.

“I appreciate the irony of that. Anyway, he never mentioned anything like that? ‘Oh, I got this soul which I stole and I left it in…?’”

“If he had, I certainly wouldn’t tell you.”

“Why not?”

The sincerity of the question takes Dean by surprise. “Uhm, because you’re evil and want to use it to destroy the world?” he suggests.

Lucifer laughs, briefly and with real humour. “You really think I would do the world a disservice there? Look at it!”

“Guess it’s still better than hell.”

“You would know. But contrary to public belief, I’m not interested in making this hell.”

“Just in dragging all the souls you don’t have in your clutches yet down to the pit.”

“Oh, please. As if I would want them. If there’s one thing the world doesn’t need, it’s even more demons.”

Dean has to agree there, though he’d like to see what Lucifer’s loyal demons would say if they heard the contempt in his voice.

“Besides,” the devil continues, “getting his soul does not equal getting his consent. I merely want a chance to… persuade him.”

“Oh, of course. Somehow, I don’t think it would be a very humane thing to do, giving him back to you.” Dean looks down at the scarred face, the crippled hands. Thinks that this guy, whoever he may be, must truly be better off dead. Whatever, exactly, that means for him right now.

“I would _never_ hurt him,” Lucifer says again, slowly this time, as though Dean were a child who just won’t get it. “This boy means more to me than you can possibly imagine, and it somewhat saddens me that you can’t see the irony of that. Don’t hold back on his account – even if he didn’t say yes, he’d be safer with me than anywhere else.”

“Right. I can just about see that before my mind’s eye,” Dean says dryly. It earns him a snort. “Especially with the scars, and all.”

“That wasn’t me,” Satan defends himself. “Actually, much of it was you. But let’s not go there – just rest assured, on the off chance, that for whatever reason you really care and don’t just aim to annoy me, no harm would come to him in my care. And it would be better for him to return to his body. He has been gone from it for too long, entering neither heaven nor hell – surely I don’t need to tell you what becomes of disconnected, lost souls.”

Dean knows, and shudders at the thought of another wild spirit to be taken down. Bones to be salted and burned, though he doesn’t think in this case that would have much of an effect.

“Okay,” he says. “Just assume that I don’t give a shit about this guy. Even if I could, I don’t think it would be a good idea to risk him saying yes.”

“Dean,” Lucifer sighs. “A list. Give me a list of reasons why things are better as they are now.” He comes walking around the table until he stands in front of Dean, too close, right in his personal space. A thin hand comes up to Dean’s face and he flinches away in disgust. The skin is flaking. One of the fingernails has fallen off.

Lucifer ignores his reaction, his fingers soon trailing over Dean’s cheek in a gesture that’s disturbingly tender. “Just think. I’m not a monster, Dean. I want to make this world better, not destroy it. I want to turn it into what my father had in mind when he created it. So name your arguments, before I name mine.”

Dean doesn’t move back further – something tells him it would be a very stupid thing to do. It’s creepy, having the devil so close to him, in his small, decaying body. He doesn’t really think anymore that Lucifer was torturing his vessel – just being in his presence for a while would be enough to threaten anyone into submission.

There is nothing sexual about this invasion of his personal space – in fact, more than anything else Dean is thoroughly freaked out and trying not to show it. Yet, a part of him keeps seeing beyond the devil to the motionless body on the table and imagines Lucifer in that form, those long fingers on his face in place of these crumbling ones, that strong, handsome face close to his own.

Lucifer leans in even closer. “I don’t hear you,” he says with a smile. “Why spare this world? Convince me.”

“People still live here.” It’s weak, he knows, but it’s all he’s got. “They still hang on and want to live, and without your stupid war fucking them over all the time, the world might actually become worth living in again.”

Lucifer’s only comment to that is, “Cute. Are those your words, or Castiel’s?”

More Castiel’s than his own, Dean has to admit. He doesn’t say it, but he’s rather sure the fallen archangel knows anyway. “Cut me some slack here,” he complains. “I’ve only known this world for a week, and what I’ve seen of it was mostly dust and the back of Cas’ jacket. Where exactly would my arguments come from?”

“True. But does what you have seen so far make you wish to look for arguments in their favour?”

“What, based on the back of Castiel’s jacket?”

Lucifer smiles and takes a step back, finally giving Dean some room to breathe. “I’d like you, Dean, if you weren’t so annoying. I’ll just take your refusal to answer that question as a no.”

Dean can’t argue against that. He kind of doesn’t see any real reason why this world is worth saving. It’s not like he wants it destroyed, he knows he doesn’t. It would be wrong, bad. Tragic. But apart from that, he can’t really tell. Cas’ words didn’t convince him. Perhaps if he lived here longer, he would be able to see beyond the destruction and the shadows in the eyes of the people he’s met, but so far, he can’t.

He settles for, “I’d appreciate it if you didn’t destroy the rest of mankind.”

“Unfortunately, your opinion doesn’t matter, I’m afraid.” There’s just enough regret in Lucifer’s voice to sound genuine and make Dean want to punch him.

“Then why bring this up in the first place? Why take me here? Only to show me that corpse? Well, I’ve seen it. I don’t know where his soul is. So if you’d just get over with killing me already? This is getting boring.”

“I don’t plan to kill you. You’re free to go, anytime.”

Dean eyes the devil suspiciously, then turns on his heels and walks to the door. It refuses to open.

Lucifer sighs. “You’re free to go anytime after we’ve finished our conversation, I meant to say.”

“Our conversation about _what_ , exactly?” Dean is getting irritated and increasingly certain that no matter what Lucifer told him, he isn’t going to make it out of this room with his limbs attached. Prince of Lies, and all that.

“You misjudge me.” Lucifer turns around and walks over to the wall, where he sits in a chair Dean is fairly certain hasn’t been there a minute before. “I understand that, really. Being the ruler of hell gives you a certain reputation. But contrary to what you think of me or expect me to do, I honestly only want to talk. I want you to listen, that is all. Give me a chance to present my arguments to you, before you make your decision whether I’m right or not.”

“Your arguments for what? Toasting mankind?”

“If you have to put it like that. It is true that I desire an end to your race. It has done too much damage, was unworthy of the love my father gave it. But,” – he holds up a hand when Dean opens his mouth to speak – “I don’t mean to cause your people any suffering. In fact, ending it quickly will be a mercy to them.”

“And pushing things to the point where annihilation would be a mercy was happening out of the kindness of your heart, too, I suppose?”

“I’m not going to lie to you, Dean. I won’t pretend that I have even the slightest bit of love for mankind. But neither do my brothers and sisters in heaven. And hardly anyone despises you as much as Michael does. Remember who it was that destroyed your major cities and brought down your civilisation. It wasn’t me.”

Dean says nothing to that because Cas already told him. It was Michael, who wanted to make a point. Look at me; I have a perfect vessel and you don’t!

“Mankind was killing this beautiful world. The end would have come anyway. By purging your race away, the world could have started over. But it all went wrong when Michael and his angels got the upper hand. Michael wants to create his paradise, but he’ll create it from the ashes of your world, and he doesn’t care how much suffering he causes in the meantime.”

“As opposed to your bleeding heart.”

“Why, of course.” Lucifer has that look again, like he’s surprised he actually has to mention it. “Suffering causes souls to turn into demons – you of all people should know. And I’m rather sick of demons. I don’t want the rotten leftovers off all those demons around me, waiting to lick my boots at every opportunity. Better kill them quickly and let them go to heaven.”

Well, he is honest – or at least he’s not sugar coating his opinion. “You can’t honestly believe I’m going to help you wipe out my own species.”

“Who says I want your help?”

“It’s obvious. You want me to find out where Castiel hid the soul and tell you so you can take it back.”

It gets him raised eyebrows and a quick smile, as if Satan is actually surprised he is smart enough to think this far. “Well. You do want what’s best for your people, right? That’s why you gave your consent to Michael in the first place. You wanted to save as many as you could. You didn’t think this would be the outcome. My brother never warned you. You made a mistake, but your intentions were good.” Lucifer’s voice is much gentler now, understanding and forgiving for sins he doesn’t even care about, and Dean’s heart clenches. His intentions were good. He wasn’t selfish.

“You want what’s best for them. I want them gone, and not in hell. If this goes on much longer, more and more people will damn themselves to the pit, and I simply don’t want them. So I’m not even asking you to agree with me. I just want you to understand that while our motivations are different, our goals happen to be the same. A clean snap, and most of those little souls will go to heaven where they can be happy forever. At this point, that _is_ the best thing they can hope for.”

Dean shivers, shifting uncomfortably. He wants to protest, but he isn’t sure he can. Voluntarily or not, he is responsible for these people’s suffering. It’s his responsibility to try and make it better.

But this hardly seems like the right way. It’s not that he has a particularly good argument against it; it merely goes against every fibre of his being.

“They don’t want to die.” It’s the best he can come up with, but perhaps this is the only thing that matters in the end. Who is he, anyway, to make this decision for them?

Lucifer smiles thinly. “They don’t know what they’re missing.” He leans back further. “I don’t expect you to come up with a decision right now. Let this move through your head a little as you continue on your road trip. Oh, right, you can go now. In fact, I’d like it if you did, because I don’t actually like you very much.” He makes a waving motion with his hand. “Just remember, I’m not the worst that can happen to this world.”

“That’s not exactly what I heard.”

“Oh, and who’s your source?” Lucifer stands up and takes a step towards Dean. “Michael, who used your body to turn this world into dust when all you wanted was to make it better? He’s the one who made this place hellish, not me. Or Castiel?” He smirks. “Castiel who kept things from you, who lied to you and who lets you believe you’re worse than you are so he can control you better? Did he ever tell you about his own part in this mess? Or what he did to your brother?”

Dean thinks of Adam, resurrected for the sake of being Michael’s suit. He thinks of what Castiel told him. “He didn’t tell me much about my brother.” He swallows. “He told me I killed him.”

For a second, surprise flashes over Lucifer’s stolen face. It ends in an almost pleased smile. “Oh. Look at that.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Excuse me, but didn’t you want to leave? You seemed to be quite eager earlier.”

“Just answer the damn question!”

“Dear Dean.” Lucifer sighs, presses his palms together as if in prayer as he looks at the human. “You didn’t kill him. That, at least is one burden you don’t need to carry.”

“I know. Michael killed him. That’s not a big revelation here. But I allowed him to by handing over my body so it _is_ my burden to carry, thank you very much.”

“Wrong again. Castiel told you that? Figures. Isn’t it sad that I, of all people, am the only one who doesn’t lie to you?”

“How do I know you’re not?” Dean asks, tensely.

“Because I don’t need to. And because it doesn’t pay off in the end. People tend to turn against you once they find out you made a fool of them. No, you didn’t kill your brother. And neither did I, before you ask. Castiel did.”

After everything, that revelation doesn’t even come as much of a shock.

“Why?”

“I’m sure he can tell you.”

“I don’t even know if he’s still alive.”

“I’m pretty sure he is. And if he is, he’ll find you. Now, get out. I’m getting tired of your face.” Lucifer turns away with a final wave of his hand, but Dean is sure he didn’t imagine the painful twist around his mouth that last moment, or the longing look he threw at the dead man on the table. Then the devil is gone, disappeared in the time it takes Dean to blink.

Dean draws in a deep breath. He wants to leave, wants to get as far from this place as possible and see if he actually makes it alive, because he still isn’t convinced of that. One doesn’t just chat with the devil and then walk away. It doesn’t work that way.

Whether it’s the thought of a sudden ambush that makes it so hard for him to leave the room, or something else, he can’t tell and doesn’t want to contemplate. He leaves.

Briefly, he thinks that it would be nice if the guys who brought him here could bring him back to where they found him just as quick, but the idea of being once more in the company of people who don’t mind dismembering others on a whim doesn’t sit well with him and he is glad when he is left alone.

In fact, it seems that the entire building only contains Lucifer and his corpse and currently Dean. It’s unlikely, though. Probably everyone else only has orders to keep their distance.

Finding the stairwell isn’t so hard in the end, mostly because it’s the only door that opens. The stairs are made of concrete, plain and cold and not at all going with the décor of the floor he just left behind.

The way down is long. Very long, and even though he knows how inconvenient that would be for Lucifer in his very breakable body, Dean expects the building to crumble any moment. It doesn’t seem to be very damaged, but it’s hard to tell for sure. Perhaps it’ll just crumble to annoy him.

He wonders if Michael would bring him back if he died. It seems likely. The angel wants something from him, after all.

Just like Lucifer. Just like Cas. Only with Cas, Dean still doesn’t know what exactly it is.

Around the fifteenth storey, Dean comes to the conclusion that these stairs are just another form of hellish torture. He’s hungry, he’s thirsty, his feet hurt and his bag is gone, has been left behind when he was taken. The only weapons he still has are the small gun in his pocket and the knife in his belt, everything else has gone with the bag. And the water.

The only consolation is that it would be even worse if he had to walk the stairs up instead of down.

It’s midday by the time he reaches ground level. The ruins of Atlanta are waiting for him, but the street leading up to the building he just left is mostly cleared, so he walks it down, with no idea where exactly to go.

If Cas can find him, he will.

If Cas has drowned in the river, if he hit his head on the way down or got impaled on a rock…. well, then Dean simply doesn’t know what he’ll do.

Somehow, he doesn’t think Cas is gone. He doesn’t know how fragile that not-quite-human body is anyway. Maybe Cas left him behind because he would survive the jump but knew Dean wouldn’t.

Or maybe he just wanted to save his own hide and didn’t care about Dean at all.

Either way, Dean finds he isn’t as worried about Castiel as he ought to be. He doesn’t really contemplate his friend face down in the water. Rather, he thinks about all the things Cas didn’t tell him, and even if Lucifer lied to him, it doesn’t change the fact that Cas lied too, and kept too many things from him. So Dean thinks about the angel and mostly only feels anger.

He hopes Cas finds him while the anger is still fresh. The guy really deserves a good punch in the face.


	4. Chapter 4

-*Interlude I*-

 

_It was hot. Too hot for all the layers he was wearing, so Castiel had pulled the long sleeved shirt off his body two miles back and tied it around his waist, causing the arms to flop against his thighs with every step. Once, neither heat nor cold would touch him. He’d register the temperature but not really feel it. That was before he fell, when he was still full of grace, heavenly power barely contained by a human shell. It hadn’t been long ago, and sometimes he still felt like this was a phase, like a passing sickness in a human body. That this, the weakness and pain and limitation, wasn’t forever._

_The heat was dry like bones and dust. It seemed to suck every fluid out of him, and he felt like he was turning into a shrivelled corpse with every step he took. This, he was familiar with by now. The heat had been going on for nearly a year, and it didn’t look like it was going to cool down anytime soon._

_Castiel found himself longing for nightfall, but the sky above him was still glaring, the washed out bright spot telling vaguely where the sun would be found were it visible through the clouds far from the horizon. It would have been better to rest through the day and walk at night, but he had information he needed to share and couldn’t allow himself a break that long._

_The outskirts of the city were visible in the distance, outlines in the gloom, mocking him. He kept walking, and they kept not getting closer. Then they did, and the ruins surrounded him. It was still a long way._

_And the midday heat didn’t lessen. Time stretched in a way the Castiel of old hadn’t been aware it could. It was still an hour to sunset when finally he felt the familiar pull on his mind and knew he was passing through the sigils protecting the camp from angels more powerful than him._

_Eventually, he reached the point where going on became painful and stopped. They were waiting for him and it wasn’t long before someone showed up to let him in, but he still found the wait annoying. He preferred to cross the ring of wards with his human companion by his side._

_Once at the heart of the small village they had built of wood and steel and rubble from broken buildings, Castiel told Roger and everyone who happened to be close enough to hear him about the gathering of demons in the east, and that most of Chicago had fallen to the Croatoan virus. The small islands still spared were closed off, unreachable for anyone unable to fly. Those people were on their own, but even if there had been a way to get them out, the village wouldn’t have bothered. Chicago was too far away for an action that big._

_The gathering was more interesting. It was close enough to the settlements at the other end of the city to force the assumption that an attack was planned. Those settlements were stretched over a large space, which made them harder to defend than small camps like theirs. They grew corn and raised cattle, and this camp just like many of the other small settlements in the area depended on the trade they did with those farming towns. Roger decided to send half of his fighting force as protection. Not only did they have to keep the entire area from suffering a devastating loss, Castiel knew their current leader also hoped for free corn and meat in return for their help. Castiel hoped he didn’t hope in vain – it depended on how much gratitude their friends in the North could afford._

_Most of the men and women currently present in the village were gathered around him by the time he finished speaking, listening closely to his words. Some lingered on after he was done, waiting for further words from their leader, while most moved back to whatever they had been doing or went to get their weapons together. Iron. Salt. Holy water._

_Everybody had the exorcisms memorized._

_There was one face Castiel didn’t see in the small crowd, and while it did not come as a surprise, he felt worry. “It’s been eight days,” he said to Roger, and Roger shrugged vaguely, looking uncomfortable._

_“He’s sick. It was rough.”_

_Castiel only nodded and left without another word. He had no doubt that he would be asked to accompany the group dispatched to help the farmers, but for now he had just returned from a very long walk, was hot and hungry and exhausted. Whether he would actually leave to fight the demons depended on what he found in the small shed he shared with his friend. He had no real obligations here. These people benefited from their presence more than they did from being allowed to stay. If Roger decided they had to leave here if neither of them fought this time, then they would leave. Castiel wasn’t sure if it wouldn’t be better that way. It wasn’t, however, his decision to make._

_The shed was what was left of a house – the only room that still had all four walls, with a roof they built themselves out of wooden planks and sheet metal. Over time, they managed to find all the gaps in their construction and filled them with dried grass to keep out the wind that every now and then dragged dust and sand through their camp. They had created wooden shields that fit in the windows to close them if needed, but at the moment they were leaning against the walls below the openings, letting the hot, dry air move through the single room and hopefully provide some ventilation._

_The sheet metal of the roof wasn’t ideal, made it heat up even more, but at least it provided shade. The inside of the shed was dim and coming out of the dusty glare of the daylight, Castiel’s eyes needed a moment before they could make out details. That, too, was a recent development._

_It was barely cooler in here than it was outside, but the air did travel through the room from the open door to the windows, and it took away most of the stink of lingering sickness. There was a bucket standing beside the bed to the left, and a bottle of water beside it on the floor that made Castiel instantly angry in its thoughtless placement. If his friend was as sick as he appeared to be, he wouldn’t be able to grab it from there, let alone screw it open._

_He sat down on the side of the bed and touched the forehead of the man lying on it, finding the skin hot and dry like the air. “Sam,” he said softly. “I am back.”_

_A shudder went through Sam’s body at the contact and he tried to move from his curled up position onto his back. The movement seemed to cause him pain, so Castiel stopped him, before turning him all the way on his back himself._

_Half-closed, unfocused eyes sought out his face. Sam’s mouth opened ever so slightly, but he didn’t try to speak._

_Castiel picked up the bottle beside the bed. As he’d expected, it was full, had never been opened. He carefully lifted Sam’s head and set the bottle to the dry, chapped lips. Sam managed to swallow three times before he choked and water ran down his chin._

_His state did nothing to lessen Castiel’s anger. He knew most of the others had difficulties dealing with Sam, but they should have had someone care for him instead of letting him lie here on his own and slowly roast in the heat._

_At least it seemed that someone had washed him every now and then in the past few days. He wasn’t as dirty as he should have been after days of illness, nor did he smell as bad._

_Sam blinked, his eyes a little clearer. “Cas,” he finally managed, his voice little more than a rattling breath. “When’d you get back?”_

_“Just now. How are you feeling?”_

_“Where’ve y’ been?” Sam’s words were slurred, his longue barely managing to wrap around the syllables. Castiel found himself worried about how weak he was. It was getting worse._

_“North.” Sam had been in the throes of his latest withdrawal when Castiel had left, had never seen him leave. The fallen angel had not liked leaving him alone, but the Croatoan outbreak had kept anyone else from making the journey. His nature made Castiel immune to the virus, and he understood and accepted that Roger did not wish to risk any of those without that protection in his place._

_“How bad?”_

_“We’ll manage. Rest now. I will take care of you.”_

_All Sam did in response was close his eyes and drift back to sleep. Castiel threw a look into the bucket beside the bed and found some vomit in it – mostly just gall fluid. Sam couldn’t have eaten anything in days. He set emptying the bucket at the top of his list of things to do, to get rid of the smell._

_He did that, then filled some clean water into the bucket and placed it back beside the bed in case Sam was sick again, all the while planning his next actions. Roger wanted his men to leave for the farms in the morning, and Castiel still hadn’t decided whether or not he would go with them. In any case, he needed sleep before that. He needed to eat and wash himself of the sweat and dust of his journey._

_He needed to take care of Sam. That came first._

_So he went to fetch water, cloths, and clean sheets. He closed the door to the shed, knowing Sam would prefer privacy for this, even though no one would come close enough to peer inside and Sam was too out of it to really care. Then he carefully stripped his friend of his clothes and moved to wash him._

_Sam hardly stirred once through the process, and Castiel’s movements were sure and experienced – by now he was familiar with the task. He even knew how to move Sam so that he had enough access to the blanket to change it. Fortunately, Sam had lain on top of the blanket all the time, never actually touching the bed sheet; those were always harder to change._

_In the end he dressed Sam into a clean pair of shorts and a loose shirt, before he used the remaining water to clean himself. Castiel didn’t own a lot of clothes, and he was pleased to see that someone had washed his remaining set while he was away. Feeling better already, though the exhaustion still seemed to drag him down, Castiel went in search of food._

_He ate in the shed, then lay down on the empty bed after checking Sam’s temperature one more time and trying to feed him some more water. He got all of one and a half hours sleep, before someone came in to ask more about the demons he had seen – if there had been anyone he recognized, if those were Lucifer’s minions or rather those who did not like to see the fallen archangel in full power and full control. Castiel gave them all the information he could without getting out of bed, his body sticking to the sheets with sweat even though the sun was sinking now and the heat slowly subsiding._

_Afterwards he drifted back to sleep, but he was woken twice more as the others planned their operation. Still, the fallen angel was mostly rested when he woke up with the light of dawn. The sun rose slowly in the east, invisible behind the clouds that hadn’t cleared away in five years and maybe never would. It was still blessedly cool and not for the first time Castiel held the irrational hope that perhaps today the temperatures wouldn’t climb too high as the day progressed._

_It hadn’t rained in three months and the water of the river that fed them was slowly receding. Castiel worried about the future of their camp. He worried that Sam wouldn’t want to leave when it became the sensible thing to do; that he would have to force the issue._

_Sam still slept when Castiel got up, but woke when the angel touched his forehead to check for fever. His temperature had gone down and his eyes were clearer. A look in the bucket confirmed that he hadn’t thrown up again during the night. He was able to drink more than a few sips of water, and Castiel was positive that the worst was over. Sam only needed rest now, and perhaps that was for the best, because if he was better, Roger would have asked him to go with them to the North and Sam would have gone._

_Castiel had a quick breakfast and tried to make his friend eat something as well, but Sam claimed not to be hungry and instead curled up and went back to sleep. Castiel had expected nothing else and he let it go this time, since Sam had been sick and his body probably couldn’t deal with solid food yet. Still, his continued refusal to feed himself was quickly developing into a problem._

_The demon blood and the withdrawal he had to go through after every use were killing his appetite, and Sam had lost a worrying amount of weight in the last years. Castiel knew he didn’t care – neither for his lack of strength and stamina, knowing that he could go on forever once he had some demon blood powering his system, nor for the effect the increased consumption of the blood had on him. The addiction was far beyond what could be cured now, and the withdrawal symptoms came closer and closer to killing him with every time he had to go through it. Castiel had seen his eyes go black when he used his powers, more than once._

_He didn’t worry about turning into a monster anymore. It served the purpose, and there was no one to stay human for any longer._

_Sometimes Castiel thought about Dean. Usually, he hoped that Dean’s soul was so deeply buried within Michael that he never knew what was going on. On rarer occasions, he hoped it wasn’t._

_Most fighters were already finished with their preparations by the time Castiel entered Roger’s house. He had his bag by his side, his weapons in his belt, and was ready to go with them. Some of the demons they were fighting were of high rank, too dangerous, and too valuable to Lucifer to let them get away. The chances of killing them were much higher if Castiel fought them than any of these humans. His friend was well enough to not need him for a few days._

_“Where’s Sam?” Lynn wanted to know._

_“Sam’s not coming.”_

_“We’re taking the wagon. He can rest on the way – it’ll be two days before we get there.”_

_“Sam’s not coming,” Castiel said again, sharper this time. “He’s not well. He’s not going to be well in two days.” It was not entirely true. With proper rest, Sam would be able to function to a certain level in two days. But being dragged through the burning hot wasteland on a wagon was no proper rest._

_“We still got some blood left. It’ll get him through.” She just didn’t want to understand. Yes, the blood would give Sam the power he needed to destroy those demons and the strength to stand on his own two feet unaided. And afterward the withdrawal, so soon after the last one, would most likely kill him._

_Castiel would not let that happen._

_“He isn’t coming, and if you keep insisting on it, neither will I.”_

_“Cas,” Roger said, and Castiel felt unusually grated by the nickname. These humans usually had more respect that that. “I understand that you don’t want to endanger your friend, but you know that no one can take down demons like Sam. His presence there would probably save many lives.”_

_“Besides, we wouldn’t have to kill the possessed ones,” Ben added._

_Everyone was looking at Castiel expectantly, waiting for him to give in. Lynn said, “And it isn’t like he’d-”_

_“No.”_

_She shifted her jaw, a defiant look on her face. “How about we ask Sam about it? It’s his decision after all.” With that, she moved toward the exit, knowing fully well that Sam would want to come. Anything to save lives._

_“Don’t wake him up.” Castiel’s voice was calm, but the command in it was sharp enough to hold her back. “Sam doesn’t know we’re going, or why. He doesn’t need to know.”_

_She looked at him, both agitated and increasingly unsure. Eventually she came back to the rest of the group, her face an angry mask. She didn’t want to die, didn’t want anyone else to die, and their chances were better with Sam around. Everyone else here shared her mindset. But no one else questioned Castiel’s decision._

_They understood that he would either leave with them, or leave them with Sam._

_In the end he left with them, and Sam slept through it, never knowing what was going on. Castiel checked on him one final time and didn’t dare to wake him from his nightmares._

_-_

_While mostly human, Castiel had retained some of his previous abilities: his senses were sharper, his reflexes quicker, and once he got used to feeling pain at all, he found that he had a higher tolerance level for it than most human males. In addition to the fact that he had been a warrior of God for millennia, this made him the best fighter in the group, and his sword struck down many demons. Besides Sam, it was the only weapon they possessed that was able to instantly destroy a demon. And Castiel didn’t like to think of Sam as a weapon, but that was how everyone saw him. That was how Sam saw himself._

_It had taken them the assumed two days to get to their destination, and the farmers were more than happy to welcome them. The demons were still in the process of assembling themselves, which was fortunate since it was another day before Castiel and the others were ready to attack. They wanted to take the demons by surprise, attack first. It worked – hell’s minions still weren’t used to the fact that whenever Castiel was even somewhat nearby, he would find them._

_It wasn’t until very near the end of the battle that Castiel looked up to the broken cliff in whose shadow they were fighting and saw Michael looking down on them, his painfully familiar outline unmistakable against the bright sky. Other silhouettes were beside him, four, five more angels, watching the slaughter going on below._

_They didn’t interfere. They did nothing to conceal their presence. They just watched._

_The group of demons was large – a hundred or more. They were trapped in the iron barriers and salt lines the humans had surrounded the area with, and exorcisms were thrown at them along with holy water and salt. But they could still fight, and the humans had to enter the barriers to get near enough, leaving themselves vulnerable. It was thirty-five humans and one fallen angel against a hundred demons. Casualties were inevitable._

_Castiel didn’t stay to deal with the immediate aftermath. When the last demon had fallen – a powerful one, but nonetheless falling to his blade as he should – he made his way up the cliff from the other side. He was faster than a human would have been and still unbearably slow. By the time he arrived, only Michael remained, waiting for him._

_He turned away from the view and looked at him with Dean’s face, said with Dean’s voice, “Hello, Castiel.”_

_-_

_Despite being a capable fighter, Roger rarely left the camp. It wasn’t safe from attack just because demons were attacking elsewhere as well. So no matter how badly they were needed, Roger himself and some of his men always remained to protect their own. It left Lynn in charge of the negotiation concerning the price for their help._

_They’d helped themselves as well, the farmers argued, since they depended on the food they got from the village. It was a valid argument – the motives of the camp were hardly completely altruistic. But the fact remained that they_ had _helped, and their help had cost them nine men and women while it saved all but two of the farmers. A little something should be given in return._

_Castiel understood the need to get benefits wherever they could. He understood that the farmers were unwilling to give anything more than they absolutely had to, since the lack of rain was hard on them too and they worried about the months to come. But the negotiations dragged on, and all he wanted was return to the camp and to Sam. After his meeting with Michael, his desire to protect his friend had become stronger than ever._

_Michael and the others had learned of the demons gathering and come to smite them. Upon seeing others were already involved in battle, they had deemed involvement unnecessary. So they had merely watched, ready to kill any demon that might still be alive when the battle was over. They never thought to help._

_Castiel knew better than to expect them to._

_He never expected to hear what Michael told him after the battle, either. Perhaps he should have. Perhaps, after everything, he was still thinking better of his former brothers and sisters than they deserved._

_Despite knowing that in the camp Sam was safer than anywhere else, Castiel was anxious to get back, and despite the gash in his arm he had received during the battle making it hard to shoulder his bag, he was about to leave on his own when finally Lynn and the farmers came to an agreement._

_It had taken them two days. Two days they needed to rest and care for their wounds, but two days none the less. It would be another two days to return to the camp. Castiel urged them to go, and was met with little resistance, though none of them looked forward to the long walk back through the wasteland._

_The way home was slow. The wagon was full of corpses and the smell travelled with them. Castiel was aware that Roger’s son was among the fallen. His name had been Dillon. Another one was Mindy, who had once shared the bed with Castiel and told him about her family’s home in New York, about her childhood and her dog._

_“Learn their names,” Sam had told him once, on a bad day years ago. “Learn their histories. You need to remember that they are people, too.”_

_It was all too easy for Castiel to reduce his understanding of humanity to Sam and Dean, and see everyone else as things that happened to be there at the time, sometimes convenient, sometimes not. He had little patience for them. Sam wanted him to see why every one of them mattered. Castiel knew it wasn’t only to keep him from being too cold._

_Sam was aware that after Dean’s betrayal, Castiel was fighting this war on humanity’s side only for him. He wanted to give the fallen angel a reason to keep going should he ever give up and go the same way his brother had gone before._

_-_

_In the end, they needed three days to make it back home, and even in the dimming light of the dying day, the signs of violence inside the camp were impossible to overlook._

_Castiel needed only a minute to declare that the attack had happened nearly a week ago. The devil’s traps, the iron barriers, everything holding back demons had been destroyed and fixed again by the time of their return. Someone was still alive then, something in there was still worth protecting. Everyone was silent and tense when they made their way to the heart of the camp, not knowing what they would find. How many were still alive._

_Whatever had happened, it happened not long after Castiel and the others had left. He couldn’t help but wonder if it was a coincidence, and what it was the demons might have so desperately wanted._

_He was running before anyone else lost it. Jumping over rubble to get to the huts quicker, he didn’t care if anyone followed him. It was only when he heard Sam’s screams that he dared to breathe again._

_Sam sounded desperate, almost hysterical, but Castiel could hear him and that meant he was still there, had not been taken. The angel had sworn not to let him get taken again, by either side._

_The screams came from underground, out of the safe room they had created out of an old basement. Castiel wanted to get down there, but Ellen and Richard blocked his way, holding him back._

_“It’s not safe,” Richard said. “Wait.”_

_Only then did Castiel really register that Ellen and Richard were there with him, instead of being dead. He looked around, saw the rest of his group come into view, saw the men, women and children coming out of their sheds and houses to greet them. Most of those whose names he had learned were still there, though some of them were sporting bandages._

_“What happened?” he asked. Richard and Ellen stepped back but remained wary, ready to hold him back again should he try to get down into the basement._

_Below them, Sam screamed for his brother._

_“’Bout twenty of them. Came hardly a day after you were gone. Alex broke the barriers,” Ellen said with bitterness in her voice. “Don’t know what they promised her.”_

_“Her son died last year,” Castiel remembered._

_Richard shrugged. “Don’t matter now, does it? Ain’t gonna meet that child where she’s going.”_

_“You killed her?”_

_“Not yet.”_

_The ground below them seemed to shake every so slightly._

_“I want to speak to her,” Castiel demanded._

_“Doesn’t have an awful lot to say. Some demon got there first. Cut out her tongue and left her for us to deal with.”_

_It was only a small portion of what the woman would have to endure in hell. It was only a small portion of what Sam would have had to go through (again) had the demons gotten him. Castiel didn’t try very hard to feel sorry._

_“Where’s Roger?” he asked. Ellen’s mouth turned into an even thinner line._

_“I am in charge now,” she said._

_Castiel only nodded, thinking that Roger had died without learning of his son’s death. Dillon had died without learning of his father’s. Maybe this was as close to a happy ending as they could get._

_“Sam,” he said. “He drank demon blood again.” It wasn’t a question. The attack had been five days ago and Sam was still screaming._

_“We had some left, but most he provided for himself.” A shudder seemed to run through Richard’s body. Castiel could imagine. He had seen Sam like that._

_“In any case,” Ellen took over, “without Sam, we would probably all have been slaughtered. But like… well, you now how it works. They didn’t stand a chance. Probably thought he was too weak to fight them, or that he’d gone with you or something. I can’t imagine they didn’t know about him.”_

_Castiel tried to interpret her words. Did she mean them like she said them? Did she really not know that the demons wouldn’t have been here if not for Sam? Or was she wilfully blind to the fact, telling Castiel this way that they wouldn’t chase them away; that it was still better with than without them? Even now it was difficult for him to deal with the indirect aspects of human communication._

_It didn’t matter, in the end. Either way, they would continue to remain here._

_And Sam had saved them. It didn’t surprise Castiel, but it worried him. He had decided to leave his friend behind to spare him another withdrawal so soon after the last, but he had been forced to fall back on the blood in order to defend the village anyway._

_The earth trembled again. Sam’s powers were running wild, out of control. Ellen and Richard were right – it would be dangerous to go in there right now. Yet, it was hard for Castiel to remain up here and let his friend suffer through this on his own._

_Castiel was aware that Sam didn’t really realise just how important he was to him._

_Down, below them, Sam was yelling at Lucifer that he wouldn’t say Yes. Not now, not ever. It was interrupted by pure and simple screams of pain._

_Castiel didn’t feel threatened by Sam’s powers, no matter how violent they were unleashed in his agony. He accepted that the others wouldn’t let him in there, though, and turned away. It was hard. It always had been, even Then, when Dean was still around. It always would be._

_Speaking to Alex was the first thing he had to do now. He was tired, exhausted from the journey, hungry. But those were just impulses of his body. Castiel had never paid as much attention to them as a human would have. As long as they didn’t keep him from functioning to the necessary level, it was easy to ignore them._

_Alex, as expected, didn’t say much. She seemed to know her fate and have accepted it. There were no ten years for her, not even the one year Dean had gotten, so long ago. There was just an execution waiting for her, and after that, hell, and she awaited it with the face of a person who knew she deserved what she would get but wasn’t ashamed of what she had done. She would do it again, Castiel could tell. Anything for her child._

_He didn’t ask about her child. He asked about the demons’ motives, about Lucifer, about Sam. Simple questions she could answer Yes or No, without needing a tongue to speak. But she didn’t know anything. Only knew that the demons wanted to get into the camp and she would be rewarded for letting them enter._

_She would never see the reward. Apparently, that was fine by her. Demons lied, but they were bound to the deals they made._

_“You will know suffering beyond anything you can imagine,” Castiel told her before he left. “You will come back one day without caring for the life you left behind or the one you sacrificed it for.” It was cruel but he wanted to be cruel. She looked at him with blood drying on her chin and didn’t blink. She knew. She’d known before she betrayed them._

_There was nothing more Castiel had to say to her._

_He entered the basement that night, and Sam’s powers didn’t hurt him. But his friend didn’t react consciously to his presence either. He was whispering things in his ruined voice, his throat raw and bleeding after days of screaming. Some of the horrors he spoke of would come true, Castiel knew. Others wouldn’t. Some already had come true in the ruins of Sam’s mind. Visions and nightmares and memories mixed and there was no sanity left in the eyes that stared at Castiel without recognition. It didn’t matter if he was here, not to Sam._

_He left only in the morning, when Sam had fallen silent. Michael’s words still rang in Castiel’s ears, making him unwilling to leave his friend alone, even though he couldn’t help him. Even though it didn’t matter, here and now._

_Except it did. For the first time it really mattered whether Sam lived or died. For such a long time, the angels or Lucifer had just brought him back to life if he died that it seemed inconsequential if he did. It wasn’t, anymore._

‘Sam Winchester’s soul is not welcome in heaven anymore.’

_Castiel should have seen it coming. Sam was rebelling against God’s plan with every day he refused to let Lucifer in and let him face off against his brother in their epic, world-renewing showdown. In Michael’s eyes he wasn’t any better than Lucifer himself. Reason enough to deny him entry to paradise._

_It was justified, in the eyes of heaven._

_So whenever he died, there was only one way for Sam to go. And even if it was only for a few hours, in hell it was months of torture. Even if Sam didn’t remember it any more than he remembered heaven, it was still real. It happened. Whenever Castiel allowed his friend to die._

_It was only in the morning that Sam’s powers started running wild again and he once again stared screaming in his raw, broken voice. Castiel was surprised it hadn’t given out long ago._

_The room didn’t contain anything but the bed Sam had been tied to with iron shackles around his wrists and ankles. Castiel had been upset to see how burned the skin beneath was – a sure sign that Sam had drunk a lot of demon blood, had sacrificed another part of his humanity. Every time he absorbed the blood, it turned him more and more demonic, and not all of the changes disappeared when the blood was out of his system._

_Eventually, after an unseen power had thrown him over twice, Castiel was forced to leave the room. There was nothing he could do for his friend anyway._

_By late morning, Sam calmed down and finally fell into the deep sleep that marked the end of his detox. He would be weak for a long time afterwards, and no matter what came up, Castiel vowed silently that he would take care of his friend and not leave the camp until Sam could come with him._

_As he unlocked the shackles, his mind drifted back to another room below ground level, another time he had freed a detoxing Sam of his bounds, and the old shame came over him. Much of this war that had devastated the world could not have happened if not for him._

_He had told Sam who had let him out of the panic room that day, years ago when the guilt over Dean became hard to bear and Sam’s own guilt became beyond unbearable. Sam had forgiven him. It had not made Castiel feel better._

_Despite the difference in height, it was easy to pick the human up and carry him outside. Castiel was still stronger than his form would lead to believe, and Sam was little more than skin and bones. He didn’t stir once on the way back to the shed, nor did he move when Castiel bandaged his burned wrists and ankles, washed and redressed him. Afterwards the angel left him to get the rest his body needed and went to Ellen, to learn more about the attack that had happened while they were gone. To see who they had lost. (He’d learned their names.)_

_Alex was executed in the afternoon. Ellen had her kneel on a pedestal in front of everyone and put a bullet through her skull. The woman never tried to reason with her, make excuses, run. She didn’t even blink, just met the fate she had accepted the moment she made a deal with the demons. She didn’t seem to be sorry for what she had done either, accepted the deaths of the people who fell in the attack as willingly as her own._

_A least she was aware of her priorities._

_Her body was taken away and dumped just outside the wards of the camp. She would be eaten by wild animals, unless a stray demon in search of a meat suit was faster and found her while she was still useable._

_In the evening, Sam woke up from his sleep without ever leaving his nightmares. He was incoherent, unable to recognize Castiel or anyone else. When Castiel came too close to him he tried to run, only to find that his legs wouldn’t carry him. When Castiel tried to help him back to bed, he fought him. His eyes were black._

_He kept yelling the same word over and over; the same negative that told Castiel without a doubt who was tormenting him in his dreams._

_When Castiel and two others had him pinned down and helpless on the bed, he started screaming for Dean._

_They had to tie him down in the end. They gagged him because they couldn’t bear to hear his words, but even the gag couldn’t block out his screams. Castiel sat with him and waited for Sam to return to them, but he didn’t. He was too far away in a world where Castiel couldn’t reach him._

_Castiel couldn’t reach him. Lucifer could. And Sam kept screaming his refusal into the night. Castiel could only listen and try to imagine what the devil was doing to his friend. What he was offering, what he promised. What kind of price Sam was paying this very moment._

_Even when he wasn’t physically present, Lucifer always found his vessel. This was the one thing Castiel couldn’t protect Sam from._

_By nightfall, a man walked into the shed, drew a pistol, and shot Sam in the head._

_The screams stopped._

_Castiel hadn’t seen that coming. He didn’t react fast enough, and afterwards he didn’t react at all. For a long moment he only stared as his mind and body were unable to decide what to do – or what not to do. Only seconds later Miro, Lynn and Richard came in, and Lynn took the weapon out of the man’s unresisting hands while Miro and Richard stood between him and Castiel, looking at Sam in shock and at Castiel in fear._

_“He wouldn’t be quiet.” The man looked only at the one he had just killed, at the blood dripping from the edge of the bed. “I needed him to be quiet.”_

_Castiel wanted to walk over there and break his neck, send his soul to hell where Sam’s already was. He wanted to shake him and tell him what he had done, what he had damned Sam to, and then end his miserable existence. The rage that welled in him was divine more than human. Sam had already sacrificed so much for them, and this was what he got in return._

_He wanted to make this man understand how very easy it would be for Sam to be free of any suffering as his blood dripped off the angel’s fingers. It would be justice, plain and simple._

_But Castiel knew that the man was called Jimmy, that he was barely twenty-five, that he had been possessed by a demon last year and still carried the memory of killing his young wife. He had learned, as Sam had wanted him to. He knew that Jimmy didn’t know; that he was already broken._

_It lessened his anger, but didn’t make it disappear. It didn’t change his desperation over Sam being torn apart this very moment. He was quiet to these people, as they wanted him to be, but where it mattered, Sam was still screaming – if he still had a tongue, or a throat._

_“He’ll be back,” Richard said, as well an assurance to them as consolation to Castiel; an attempt to not have him kill the boy who had done this. “He’ll probably be better later than he was before. They’ll heal him.”_

_Castiel looked at him. At Miro, who looked anxious, at Lynn, who watched them with no expression at all. “He’s in hell,” he said. Six minutes. Sam had been in hell for half a day. ”Leave.”_

_They did._

_Closing his eyes, Castiel took a deep breath. Tried to calm down. Cursed Jimmy and Dean and Michael. His hands were calm when he knelt down beside the bed and took off Sam’s restrains. Then he pulled the gag from his mouth, leaving it slack and half-open. Sam’s eyes were closed. He looked peaceful, and the irony was burning._

_Eventually, Castiel cleaned away the blood. He carried Sam over to his own bed and changed the bedding for clean sheets and an unsoiled pillow while he waited for Sam to come back to life. An hour. Six days on the rack._

_Nothing happened._

_Nothing happened for the rest of the day. Castiel waited by Sam’s side through the night, waiting for the moment when his wounds would heal and he would come back to life with a gasp. It didn’t happen. The night passed and the next day, and Sam had been in hell for half a year. Castiel began to wonder what he would get back. Half a year in hell wouldn’t be enough to break Sam Winchester, but his life was not so different from the pit. The addiction, the withdrawal, the things demons and angels did to him whenever they could, to make him say yes and let them finish their war. Sam had been tormented almost without a break since before Dean had turned his back on him. Castiel didn’t know how much was too much._

_When the second night was over, the others began to worry. What if Sam didn’t come back this time? He scared them, with his crazy withdrawal and his unnatural powers, his visions and guilt and the way his awareness slipped when it was too hard to focus on reality for long with all the trauma of his memories and dreams, but they needed him too, knew no one could protect them from demons the way Sam could. They were scared of losing that – even Lynn, who never forgave Castiel for not taking Sam along to the North. Lynn, who checked in at least once an hour to see if Sam was back yet._

_Castiel never worried about that. He knew it was only a matter of time, but time was so much crueller than any of the others could possibly imagine._

_It took three days in the end, until suddenly a shudder ran through Sam’s body, and then he was convulsing in a way he never had before. He woke up with a scream and shot upright on the bed. Castiel caught him before he could fall back down, felt him go nearly limp in his arms. Sam’s whole body was trembling, and when the fallen angel let him down slowly, he saw that his friend was crying; tears running noiselessly down pale, hollow cheeks._

_His eyes, for the first time in days, were clear._

_“Cas,” he whispered. Drew his arms close to his body and shivered. Castiel ran a hand through his tangled hair in a brief gesture of consolation and they caught in a spot where he’d missed some blood and it had dried and stuck the hair together. Perhaps they would have to cut it. Sam’s hair was too long to be practical anyway. It wasn’t a matter of a style he had chosen for himself, he just never paid enough attention to himself to cut it._

_The skin and skull under Castiel’s fingers were unbroken, whole. The fatal wound had disappeared. Everything else had not._

_The burns around his wrists were still there. The slash across the ribs he had suffered in battle was still there, beginning to start bleeding now the blood was flowing again. All the scars, the badly healed fractures in his bones remained._

_There had been a time once when Sam was brought back completely healed, in perfect condition. It hadn’t been like that in years. Now only the fatal wounds were healed, and sometimes even those only to an extent where survival was possible, but not a given. Sometimes Sam would come back to life only to die again in a matter of hours. Both Michael and Lucifer wanted him to suffer, to never let him have a break. Eventually, they figured, he would have to give in, if only to finally find peace._

_Catiel knew Sam better than anyone now. He knew Sam was tired, and he knew that Sam knew he wouldn’t get any relief anytime in the foreseeable future. Sometimes Castiel wondered if his friend learned the names of the people he met too, so when he was tempted to give in he had something to hold on for. He had learned through Sam (and Dean) that it was easier to fight for Lynn, who wanted children and couldn’t have them, who’d lost her little sister when she was twenty and her parents when she was thirty and was planning to marry Ben before the end of this year, than for a hundred thousand anonymous faces._

_Now Sam had returned after a year in hell, and he’d returned as himself, which meant that once again he had refused to give up. Castiel knew that a Yes spoken in the deepest circle of hell was still a Yes, and he couldn’t support his friend there. Sam was all alone when he was dead. Castiel wasn’t entirely sure how he could hold on._

_Holding on was hard enough for Castiel, who never suffered like that and who when something killed him would only die. But Castiel wasn’t fighting for his own people, and his affection for humanity had once been based almost entirely on his affection for Dean. It had been hard to keep to his chosen path after Dean had let him down._

_He kept going, in the end, because Sam did. It had impressed Castiel then, when he’d seen his friend fall apart and was so sure he would follow his brother’s decision, just so he wouldn’t have to live with his guilt and because he had nothing left to fight for. But Sam had held on to his No, sometimes screaming it over and over through torturous days full of agony and desperation, hanging on to the word until he remembered why he had to. Castiel hadn’t thought much of the human boy when he’d first met him, had seen him as a threat more than anything else. Even when he’d come to see him as a friend, he hadn’t ever really had faith in him – perhaps because Dean didn’t. When Sam had fought even though there was nothing he could ever gain for himself, Castiel had been unable to let him do it on his own._

_He was the only one left._

_“Cas,” Sam muttered again, and from the way his voice sounded his throat was still raw from days of screaming. “Oh God. I’m so sorry.”_

_“Sorry for what?” Castiel found himself regretting that he didn’t think to bring a damp cloth to clean Sam’s forehead of sweat. On top of the erasure of discomfort, the simple activity usually had a calming effect on Sam when he was awake through it. Now the sweat remained on his pale skin and his eyes were wet with tears as he tried to roll on his side, away from Castiel._

_“They came for me. If I hadn’t been here… Knew it was a risk, but I thought…”_

_“Do not blame yourself for this,” Castiel said, knowing Sam did. “It was Alex who made a deal with the demons.”_

_“Because of me.”_

_“If not for you, none of these people would be alive today.”_

_Sam didn’t point out that none of these people would ever have been in danger if he hadn’t killed Lilith and freed Lucifer, if he hadn’t allowed Michael to take his brother as a vessel. He didn’t need to. They had had this discussion too many times before._

_“Is Alex still here?” Sam asked quietly. “I want to talk to her.”_

_“She died.” Castiel didn’t go into detail. This was all Sam needed to know. As an afterthought he added, “I believe she was fine with it.”_

_Had probably welcomed it. Alex had made her decision, had accepted that for her child to live she would have to do something she knew was wrong. Maybe knowing she wouldn’t have to live with the consequences had made it easier. (Maybe Sam envied her.)_

_Sam didn’t say anything in reply. He lay curled up and shaking on his bed, and after a few minutes he gave in and started to cry openly. Castiel allowed him that moment without comment. It was too much, and Sam needed to find relief in whatever form he could. He did not remember hell, but it had still happened to him and he felt the aftershocks, even if they seemed to come out of nowhere._

_Castiel wondered if Sam knew._

_“We should leave.”_

_Sam’s words came as a surprise. It was him who had always insisted on staying and using his powers to protect these people, and It was Sam who said they should use the camp as a home base for the trips he took to free as many possessed humans as possible of the demons who used them. Castiel had agreed without much resistance because he understood that Sam needed something to live for. He had often wanted to move on for good, though. They were limited here and while the people around them appreciated the help and knew how much they depended on Sam, they didn’t feel comfortable around him and Sam knew it. Castiel always felt the two of them would do better on their own._

_It was only two weeks later, when they were on their way to Wyoming, that Castiel began to wonder if maybe Sam had wanted them to stay for so long because he wanted Castiel to have other people he knew and cared about after Sam had finally given up._

 

-

 

Michael waits for him outside, and Dean isn’t even surprised to see him. He’s also very much awake and thereby suspects that Michael is very much real.

“Little brother send you a text message?” he growls. “I thought you’d have something better to do than stalk me. Oh, wait! All the major cities are already gone, right? I’d wondered what you do to kill time now. Stealing candy from children was a favourite.”

Michael raises his eyebrows, looking to all the word like a child who has no idea why he’s being accused of being anything less than perfect. “You’re angry with me.”

“Yeah, I think I might be.”

Michael gives a long-suffering sigh. “Dean…”

“Don’t ‘Dean’ me! I think you’ve Deaned me long enough.”

“You used to understand,” Michael says. “I regret having to let you go, leave you to this world again. I know it isn’t pleasant. And I wish you hadn’t forgotten so much. You would understand if you could remember. You understood so well before.”

Dean wants to tell him how Castiel suspects that Michael erased his memories on purpose, but considering how he doesn’t exactly trust Cas at the moment, it might not be the best argument under closer inspection.

So he just asks, “Why did I forget?”

“We were one for a long time,” Michael says with some regret. “The separation was traumatic for both of us. You lost an important part of yourself. Your mind shut down and erased all memories because in your vulnerable state you wouldn’t have been able to deal with them.”

“Will I get them back?”

“You have been very lucky,” Michael says instead of a proper reply. “You only lost your memories. Other vessels are left almost completely useless; mindless and empty. They can only be restored to a functional being if the angel they hosted returns.”

“So you’re saying to get my memories back, I need to let you back in? That what you’re saying?” Dean isn’t entirely sure that’s what he’s supposed to take from Michael’s words, and he isn’t sure it’s true either. “Too bad if I did that I wouldn’t be me any more so it wouldn’t actually matter.”

“You misunderstand the details,” Michael tells him. “But that can’t be helped. Just remember that you knew the price you would have to pay for giving your consent, and that you deemed it acceptable.”

“Yeah, well. I might not be able to remember anything, but I’m sure I didn’t come to you and asked you to vaporize the state of Washington for me.”

“It _was_ you who came to me in the end. But that is of no import right now. I am here to help you.”

“In exchange for…?”

A shadow of impatience appears on Michael’s youthful face. “You doubt my motives with you? Lucifer did not have a good influence on you. Perhaps you should consider that he is the devil to your people. Not the best person to listen to.”

“Funny how everyone tells me that about everyone else!” Dean snaps.

“Why is it so hard to believe that I simply do not wish for you to starve to death in search of your friend who might just as well have abandoned you?”

“I don’t know. But I guess it might have something to do with the fact that you took my memories and dumped me without food or water or a fucking clue in a fucking desert!” Yeah, it’s still hard not to be a little pissed about that.

“Come with me, Dean.”

“Come where?”

“I can take you back to Castiel.”

“Who abandoned me to the enemy. Your compassion is touching.”

“You should know, now more than ever, that you need to be with him.”

“So I can find out where he’s hidden the soul of Lucifer’s vessel. Yeah, your brother told me about that. I still find it amazing that you so badly want to find it. I mean, you could end this whole mess any time, without breaking a sweat, but you want to give the fucking devil every chance to quite possibly kick your ass.”

“Our fight will have to happen in the right way,” Michael says with dignity, every inch the righteous archangel.

“And the world gets the short straw. You know, it’s really hard to tell who’s the evil guy here.”

“I believe that would be a matter of perspective. My brother certainly thinks he is in the right, that the world owes him something. That doesn’t _make_ him right.”

“Doesn’t make you right either.”

“Yes, it does. I follow my father’s plan. Like you did yours, Dean. You and I are not so different. You used to see that. You saw that the best chance for reaching your own goals was through me. You were willing to make great sacrifices for that.”

“Except you didn’t do what I thought you would,” Dean defends himself. “I was willing to sacrifice myself to you to save humanity, and you let me believe you would do that. And then you took my body and used it to kill millions.” He took a step closer to the other, because Michael was an archangel pretty close to the peak of his powers and that was damn intimidating, but hell, Dean had just chatted with fucking Satan, and whether Michael liked it or not, in matters of intimidation he was a clear step away from that.

“That’s what my brother told you.” Michael nods, as if he didn’t expect anything else. “He would, of course. He was right in one thing: You did want the best for your people. And that was me. Yes, I killed millions. They then went to heaven, beyond the pain of this mortal plane.”

“A pain you are responsible for,” Dean reminds him.

“There is no point in discussing this with you as long as your mind is set on seeing evil in me,” Michael decides. “Just know, before you keep accusing me, that you knew that millions would die in this war if you chose me – and more if you didn’t. Know that you, too, had some control over our actions. Not everyone was killed by me. It was you who put an end to the life of a man who was like a father to you. It was you who forced yourself on your brother as punishment for his sins.”

Dean’s hands turn into fists. “What?”

“Oh, Dean.” Michael looks at him sadly. “You were so angry. So full of wrath. How could I not let you have that revenge after everything he put you through? He, more than anything else, pushed you to me.” He lifts a hand to cup Dean’s cheek and Dean is frozen, too shocked to move or even register it. “He deserved it, and more. Do not feel bad.”

“Don’t feel bad?” Dean’s voice is a whisper. He hopes he misinterpreted those words. He must have – he wouldn’t. No matter how angry he was. He knew he didn’t, and he shouldn’t even think about asking. But he couldn’t stop himself. “Did you just tell me that I raped my own brother?” He looks into the face Michael is wearing. The terribly young face of a boy he can’t even remember. “The brother you’re wearing right now?”

“Do not dwell on it,” Michael says calmly. “Just keep it in mind for the next time you feel the need to judge my actions. It all makes sense from where we are standing, even if from your limited view it seems wrong.” He looks up, at the building Dean has just left, and maybe Lucifer is looking down at him, at them, but Dean can’t care and can’t move. “Find Castiel without my help if you don’t want it. And find out where he hid the soul. Only then will this world finally know peace.”

He is gone before Dean can even blink.

 

-

 

He doesn’t find Castiel, but that’s okay. Castiel finds him, and when he does, Dean is sitting inside a burned out one-story building and staring into nothing. He’s still in Atlanta, and as far as he can guess Atlanta must be swarming with demons. But he never sees them, and Castiel makes it to him in one piece and with all his limbs attached.

“What was that about the demons wanting to torture me into joining their forces you told me about?” he hears himself say as a greeting, and it’s funny, because that’s not what he’s been thinking about. “I just had a nice chat with the devil. He let me go in one piece.”

“There are demons who would harm you if they got the chance. Not all demons are happy with having Lucifer back. Those who want to be rid of him would do anything to keep Michael from using you again,” Castiel explains, as if they hadn’t been separated for a day; as if he hadn’t left Dean behind.

“Ah. Would have been handy if you’d been more specific before.”

“My apologies. I didn’t think it was important as any kind of contact with demons would be bad.”

“Bad for me? Or for you? You’re the one they want to torture the information out of. I don’t have it, so I’m safe.”

“That’s why you don’t have it. They would have wanted to torture it out of you too if you knew.”

“You know, I would have said the same if I were you.” Dean finally looks at Castiel. The angel is dirty as hell, covered in the dust that must have stuck to him when he was still soaking wet, but apart from that he seems none the worse for wear. “I also would have claimed knowing they wouldn’t harm me as the reason for leaving me behind.”

“I’m sorry.” Castiel lets out a weary sigh. “I had indeed hoped that they would refrain from doing you any harm.”

“You hoped,” Dean echoes flatly.

“I don’t know how Lucifer thinks, what he’s planning in detail. It’s possible that he would have seen hurting you as the more promising course of action, although that is not his style. However, had he done that, Michael would have interfered.”

“Before or after Lucifer tortured me?”

Castiel hesitates long enough to make the answer redundant. “Probably afterwards,” he admits. “He would have healed you, of course. But he would have seen this as an opportunity to make you understand that Lucifer is your enemy. To keep you from listening to him.”

“I’m not listening to anyone right now,” Dean explains impatiently. “Everyone’s telling me something else, but I’m beginning to get a bit of a picture here. Why don’t you contribute to it and tell me why you were so quick to leave me behind?”

Castiel drops the bag he is carrying at Dean’s feet and sits down beside him. Dean looks at the bag – it’s his, the one left behind when he was taken to Lucifer. Castiel must have retrieved it.

“I am sorry,” the angel says again, with emphasis. “I had no other choice. Had they taken me, Lucifer might have found a way to get the information he wants. I could not risk that.”

Dean nods slowly, not exactly pacified, but a little more willing to listen now he has his bag back and can associate Castiel’s mysterious keepsake with something real. “The soul of Lucifer’s vessel?”

For a moment, Cas looks surprised. “He told you?”

“He showed me. Has the body barred up like a treasure there.” He gestures vaguely in the direction of the building he met the devil in and Cas follows his hand with his eyes, as if he could see right through the walls and the dark of night. “Told me you stole the soul so the guy couldn’t say yes to him.”

Castiel doesn’t look at him. He still looks at the building he can’t even see, and once again, Dean imagines Lucifer looking back at him. He wonders if Castiel can still sense him; if they can sense each other.

“How does he look?” Cas asks quietly, eventually.

“Lucifer?” Dean shrugs. “Disgusting. Wearing a teenager whose skin is falling off.”

But Castiel shakes his head. “The body. Lucifer’s vessel. How does he look?”

Dean frowns at him. After all, Castiel knew the guy and must know what he looks like. Then, finally, he gets what the angel is talking about. That man has been dead for more than a century, after all.

“Like he’s just died,” he says, summoning the picture from his memory with disturbing ease. “He’s very thin, and full of scars, but I didn’t see what killed him. Looks like he’s sleeping except… well. Deader.”

“Scars…” Castiel mutters. “I see.”

“You see?”

“I burned the body,” Castiel tells him, finally looking at him but not, his eyes gazing back at a day long, long ago. “I burned him in holy fire. I didn’t expect Lucifer or Michael to be unable to recreate it from the atoms, but I hoped it would make it difficult for them. Distract them by looking for his molecules so they would not look for his soul right away. It’s… interesting that the body was resurrected not in ideal shape but the way he looked when he died. That is all.”

The thought going through Dean’s head isn’t a realisation, not really. “He was your friend. The one you told me about.”

“Yes.”

“And you killed him.”

“Yes.”

“That’s all? ‘Yes’? You generally treat your friends like this? It was convenient to leave me behind to save your own ass, so you did. It was convenient to kill him so he couldn’t say yes, so you did.”

“I would have killed him before had I found a way to make it stick sooner,” Castiel says without remorse. “He died often, and rarely quickly. He was brought back every time. When he died, he was denied the place in heaven he would have deserved, so he went to hell instead. When he was alive, the nightmares and guilt never stopped. There was no rest for him in life and none in death. I wasn’t worried he would say yes. I merely wanted for him to have peace.”

“If it was that bad he would have gone insane by then,” Dean points out. Constant torture does that to a person.

To his surprise, Castiel only nods. “He was. Sometimes.”

“Great,” Dean mutters and becomes aware that the topic got away from him again, away from the answers he wants. Though he thinks he might have gotten them, and he thinks he might be forgiving Castiel right now and that really sucks, because he doesn’t want to forgive Castiel. It’s just that he needs to trust _someone_ , and while he certainly can’t trust Cas, out of all the people he’s gotten to know so far, Cas is the only one who never at least partially destroyed the world.

“It was wrong of me to leave you behind like that,” Cas says like he’s been reading Dean’s mind. “But I have to protect my friend. It takes precedence over everything. I can’t risk having Lucifer or Michael finding his soul.”

Dean thinks maybe be can understand that, except he’s sure he’s never had anyone he would go that far for. Sacrifice anything and anyone. He thinks he might be a little jealous.

His anger isn’t entirely gone, but his disgust is stronger. Disgust with himself and disbelief sitting in his guts like stones.

He has to bring it up, as much as he doesn’t want to. Because he trusts Cas a little bit more than anyone else, or maybe because he just has to (since he’s not entirely sure he does trust Cas that much).

“I met Michael again,” he says. “This time he was really there.”

“What did he want?”

“Help me. Or so he said.”

Castiel snorts. It’s the most open display of an opinion Dean has seen him offer since the night he told Dean of all the ways in which he’s betrayed them.

The sickness that has been sitting in his stomach since Michael disappeared on him gets stronger. The words leave his mouth like vomit. “Michael said I raped my brother. Said I was angry and he deserved it.” He closes his eyes. “Is it true?”

There are hands on his shoulders suddenly, gripping him too tightly not to cause pain, and he opens his eyes to Castiel staring at him.

“What exactly did Michael say to you?” the angel wants to know. “What did he say happened, Dean?”

The intensity in his words, his eyes scares Dean. He flinches back instinctively, tries to hide in the deeper shadows, but Castiel’s eyes always find him.

“He said he let me take control and I did it. Not him. Me.” The words burn on Dean’s tongue, and he doesn’t even care enough to feel ashamed for how his voice sounds so small. Like a little boy’s.

“He lied.” Castiel’s voice is hard, but he lets go of Dean’s shoulders and leans back. “You didn’t do it. You never even knew it happened.”

It’s a relief, but it doesn’t completely ease the knot in Dean’s stomach. “But it happened.”

“It was Michael. He pretended to be you. But your brother never believed it. Not for one moment. Not even after everything else.” Even in the shadow of the night, Dean can see Cas’ shoulders slump as the tension leaves him. “I did not believe you deserved such faith at that time.”

Dean is still trying to get the information into his mind. Somehow, it’s more shocking now that he knows it wasn’t him. Maybe that’s because he couldn’t believe he’s ever been able to do something like that, not really, not even while he hated himself for it. But this – Michael doing that; _anyone_ doing that to his little brother is almost more than he can take in.

Slowly, anger is working its way up through the shock. “Michael did that… He hurt my brother like that?” He thinks of Michael, looking so comfortable in his vessel. It makes him feel sick. “Why did he do that to him? To Adam?”

“No…” Cas says, sounding uncomfortable. “Not Adam. Your other brother. Sam.”

For a second, it’s like everything suddenly makes sense. Like all the pieces are falling into place, like Dean remembers who he is just at the mention of a name, and he is left kneeling in the mud of a ghost town at night while the world ends without a word.

The second passes and Dean’s just Dean again, without memories of any brother he might ever have had, or of any life. But his heart remembers, sending wild, desperate beats that shake his whole body, and his lungs remember, refusing to breathe.

Perhaps his eyes remember, too.

“Sam?” he whispers, as if the name could fade away if he didn’t hold on to it. “He was the one you meant when you were talking about my brother, right? Not Adam.”

“Adam was your brother, too,” Castiel explains. “But you never knew him. And neither did I.”

“Why did Michael do it?” Dean has to know. “What was the _fucking point_? I thought he would... Was it because of me? Because he wanted to discourage you from trying to get me back?” It’s the only explanation he can come up with. It almost makes sense, in a twisted, psychopathic kind of way – _he_ wouldn’t try to get back a guy who’s happily raped his own brother.

Once again Castiel hesitates before answering. The whole topic seems to be uncomfortable to him. It hardly comes as a surprise.

“Partially,” the fallen angel finally says. “But mainly to break your brother, take away his reason for fighting.”

And one of the puzzle pieces that has fallen into place just a minute before only to blow up in Dean’s face falls into place again, and he doesn’t get why he hasn’t seen it before when it is so glaringly obvious. “The body Lucifer showed me… His perfect vessel. That’s Sam, isn’t it?”

Cas’ voice sounds strangely sad in the darkness. “Yes.”

“God.” Dean leans forward, buries his head in his hands. He thinks of the scarred face, the crippled hands. The odd protectiveness that suddenly makes so much sense. “That’s my brother. And he’s dead. And… you killed him.”

“Dean…”

“No. I get it. You did it to protect him. I get it. I just…” Dean shakes his head, but it won’t clear. “Why didn’t you tell me from the beginning? You killed him and you took his _soul_ and… Where is it, Cas?”

“I can’t tell you that, Dean.”

“Tell me!” Dean jumps to his feet and then he’s on Castiel, grabbing his shoulders and shaking him. “I need to find him! I need to _know_!”

Cas sighs sadly and gently removes the human’s hands from his shirt. “This is exactly why I can’t tell you.”


	5. Chapter 5

The demons keep away the second day in the city as well, but Castiel remains uneasy all the time, overly cautious, even though it’s clear by now that everyone and their dog seem to think the best course of action is leaving them alone until Cas tells Dean where to find the soul.

Dean doesn’t know if they are being monitored all the time, or if Michael and Lucifer simply expect him to tell them once he knows. Michael said he didn’t know everything that Dean and Cas were doing, but he doesn’t seem to have a problem finding him either.

He asks Cas about that at once point, after they’ve been walking side by side in silence for a while, and Cas tells him that Michael can find his mind when he is asleep but he can’t find his physical form due to some protective signs Cas once burned into Dean’s ribs.

However, Michael and Lucifer probably both know very well where they are right now. It’ll be hard to lose them again.

There’s something else that bothers Dean. “The guys who took me to Lucifer – you know, the ones you abandoned me to – those were fallen angels too, weren’t they? Like you.”

“Not like me,” Cas corrects him. “They’re fallen angels who joined Lucifer’s side. They’re cut off from heaven like me, but they get their strength from another source now. In a direct fight they’d have the advantage.”

“Besides outnumbering you, of course. I get it. What I don’t get is why you didn’t sense them the way you sensed Lucifer.”

“Because they are lesser angels and Lucifer is an archangel. My grace is nearly completely gone. It doesn’t pick up the presence of other angels like it used to. But Lucifer is widely visible, even to me.”

That makes sense, Dean supposes – it’s not like he has any idea how exactly Grace works. “Could Lucifer find my broth... Sam’s mind, too?” His tongue stumbles over that name like it’s from another language. “You know, come to him in his dreams and all that?”

“He did.” Castiel’s voice is quiet. He seems absorbed in the simple process of walking once again. “The connection was stronger between them than between you and Michael. Lucifer came often. There was no way to keep him out.”

“What did he do?”

“Sam never spoke much of it. As far as I know, he just talked to him.”

“Yeah, he seems to be rather fond of the sound of his own voice,” Dean recalls. “What did he talk about? The weather? His latest plans for universal domination?”

“Sometimes. I know he tried to seduce Sam into saying yes. Sometimes he tried to break him.”

They left the ruins of Atlanta hours ago and finally Dean feels like he can breathe again. Castiel seems more willing to talk, as if they’ve left the devil behind them with the city. As if that were possible.

“Lucifer told me he’d never hurt him.” Dean thinks back to his meeting with the devil, recalls the possessive protectiveness the archangel displayed towards his vessel and feels anger wash over him.

“He wouldn’t. Not physically.” Castiel sounds hesitant, as if unsure that his words are actually the truth. “He wanted Sam’s consent, so he needed him on his side. Just torturing him into saying Yes wasn’t his style. Lucifer showed your brother kindness where no one else did. He offered protection and love.”

Dean frowns. “Really doesn’t sound particularly cruel to me,” he says doubtfully.

“It was,” Castiel informs him bluntly. “And even Lucifer’s patience isn’t endless. He never harmed Sam physically, but he allowed others to do it. He knew physical torture wouldn’t get him anywhere, though.”

Dean doesn’t say anything, waits for Cas to continue on his own.

After a moment, he does. “He would threaten Sam. When offering to protect the people he cared about once Sam said yes, he also threatened to kill or torture them if Sam continued to refuse him.”

“And he did,” Dean whispers.  He tries to imagine the pressure that comes with such a threat. Perhaps it was because of something like this that he gave in to Michael.

Castiel nods. “He did.”

Dean tries to imagine the guilt.

“Not all the devastation you see around you was caused by Michael and his angels,” Cas adds. Dean doesn’t feel like that lifts any of his own guilt.

Speaking of which… “Michael said I’d killed a friend of mine. That it was me, not him. Someone who was like a father-”

“Bobby,” Cas interrupts him. “As far as I know, you and Sam often stayed with him when you were children. You were close.”

“And I killed him?” Dean asks numbly.

“No. Michael did.”

Dean still feels like crying. For Bobby, for his brother… It’s strange, to feel so sad because of people he might, for all he remembers, never have met.

“Why?”

“To take away Sam’s support. Sam didn’t have many friends. It was widely known that he had broken the last seal. Bobby was the only one still caring for him. His loss was… difficult to bear.”

There doesn’t seem to be much more to say for the moment. Dean has learned about his brother today, and he knows now that there was a man he used to love like a father and that he’s dead, and somehow it’s leaving him feeling depressed and hopeless even though the man would have been dead anyway, two hundred years later.

“Where are we going now?” Dean is tired of asking this question, and he’s tired in general, so that’s kind of fitting.

“We’re going to a place I know. It’s well protected against demons and angels. There we will rest for a few days.”

“And then?”

Cas glances at Dean and gives him the hint of a smirk. “Then we’ll move on.”

 

-

 

Somewhere along the way, Cas found food. Dean has no idea where – he must have gotten it while they were separated, because he sure as hell doesn’t remember him stopping in a supermarket. That’s exactly what must have happened, though, since Cas pulls cans of dried or pickled food out of his bag the minute they sit down to rest; expiration date: the year five-thousand.

It makes Dean think of Jena and the way he first met her. (He still isn’t sure if he thinks she’s a demon, or an angel, or some other kind of monster. With all these apocalyptic events it’s hard to remember that those exist, too.)

The food tastes like he always expected food without expiration dates to taste centuries after being manufactured, but Dean doesn’t mind. He’s hungry enough to eat dust. Lucifer wasn’t exactly the best host in that regard. What kind of shitty behaviour was that anyway, presenting his guest with the corpse of his dead brother and then having the balls to tell him he _cared more_?

Except that it was kind of true, because Dean doesn’t care. He can’t. He doesn’t remember ever having had a brother.

A brother who, apparently, still had faith in him after Dean betrayed them all.

That night they sleep in a forest, and Dean wakes up when Castiel presses a hand to his mouth and looks at him with worried eyes. At first Dean thinks they are being attacked again, but then he feels the beating of his heart and the sweat cooling in the chilly air.

“I dreamt I was holding someone who died,” he rasps when Cas lets him. Was it his brother? He doesn’t remember. He remembers a heavy weight in his arms and blood on his hands, remembers himself talking, then screaming, but he doesn’t remember the words. Did that really happen?

Cas nods, as if he expected that. “You were screaming your brother’s name.”

That answers that question, then.

“It felt so real. Like a memory. Did it happen?” Dean looks at the angel, desperate for answers. Wondering if he’ll get the truth for once.

“I don’t know the details of your dream,” Castiel informs him. “But your brother did die in your arms once. It was the first time you lost him. I didn’t know either of you then, but I know it made a strong impact on you.”

If nothing else, Dean can imagine that. Though actually, he kind of can’t.

He still doesn’t know if he really wants his life back.

“Tell me about that friend of mine Michael killed,” he asks.

Castiel makes a movement that looks like a shrug. “I met him through you. A rather gruff personality. He never hesitated to tell you what he thought, but he cared for you and your brother like a father.”

“What did he… I mean, how did he react when I said yes?” Dean swallows, not sure he wants to hear the answer.

“It broke his heart,” Cas tells him without mercy. “He’d tried to prevent it.”

“By locking me in. Yeah, you mentioned that. And… my brother let me out.”

“Yes.”

“I suppose…” What was the name again? “Bobby? Wasn’t happy about it, huh?”

Cas sighs. “No. But he was angry with you rather than Sam. I think he was impressed by the faith your brother had in you even then. He never forgave you for letting him down like that. It’s Sam who never forgave himself.”

“You really know how to make a guy feel good about himself,” Dean mutters. Cas throws him a level gaze from a face displaying no emotion.

“There’s nothing to feel good about here, Dean.”

So much for that.

“What happened after? Did the three of you stay together?”

“No. Bobby was bound to a wheelchair. He couldn’t move around with us while we were looking for you, for a way to separate you from Michael. He stayed behind and provided us with information he gathered, and a base to rest in. When the destruction started and the demons were everywhere he wrote books on them, on protection and how to fight them. By then everyone knew monsters were real. Bobby didn’t ask for money for the books as long as someone would print and distribute them. Many people are alive today because of him. He died five years after you left.”

“Did he know… I mean, did Michael pretend to be me?”

“I don’t know. I wasn’t there.”

It’s not the comforting reply Dean hoped for. He sits in silence until Cas adds gently, “He knew you. If Michael pretended, he wouldn’t have believed him.”

“How did Sam take it?”

“Badly.”

Dean thinks about that until he drifts off to sleep again. He wakes up in the morning when Cas tells him they have to move on. It’s not until nearly midday that he realises that the fallen angel never got any sleep that night. He needs to make sure that Cas gets his turn of rest as well, in the future, since he doesn’t seem to take care of it himself.

Dean wonders if Cas and Sam were like this: walking and wandering and fighting, with Cas leaving all the sleep to Sam and Sam screaming in his dreams.

 

-

 

Dean doubts either demons or angels ever really let them out of their sight, but at least they leave them alone. Eventually, they cross a forest that looks a little more alive than any other they saw before, and Dean expects there to be settlements around. Of all the places he’s seen so far, this is the one he would have chosen, but there is no sign of human life anywhere to be found and Castiel never allows him to rest, keeps hurrying him along so they are out of the forest before nightfall.

Dean decides not to ask about that, nor does he ask why they keep walking half through the night until the forest is entirely out of sight.

He doesn’t sleep that night.

While the two of them avoided the major cities where they could all through their journey, they saw signs of human civilisation all the time, and Dean knows there are people living in those cities, finding shelter in the ruins and inside their groups. After they passed the forest, there is nothing more. Every now and then, there are the leftovers of small towns, or single, collapsing farmhouses, but none of them show any sign of life. Even though some of the towns look almost untouched, Castiel chooses a way that leads far around them, and Dean never protests. This doesn’t feel like the dead valley they crossed before, but in another way it feels just as bad.

Dean feels watched, is cautious of every shadow. Yet he knows, as certain as he ever knew anything, that they are alone.

The bad feeling gradually eases, and it’s like they crossed a barrier no one else ever crosses; the area remains empty, devoid of human life. There are animals, though, plenty of them, and the grass is a little greener, the trees carry a little more fruit. This would be a good area for humans to live in, Dean thinks – as good as it gets anymore.

There are no humans around, just them.

Castiel’s hideout is in a cave, not far from an abandoned farm. It’s up a steep slope, overlooking the area, which explains why Cas chose this place rather than the comfort of a real, well-preserved house. There are cans full of conserved food around, and a stack of furs from animals Cas must have killed himself. Dean tries to imagine it: the angel of the lord, sitting over a bloody carcass, cutting the skin off with his silvery knife while blood stains his hands. The picture enters his mind with surprising ease.

The entrance to the cave is hidden between bushes, but holes in the ceiling provide enough illumination for them not to run against rocks until Cas lights a torch and leads Dean deeper into the mountain where there are no holes anymore and no risk of getting rained on. Altogether, the cave isn’t too deep, but it’s deep enough. It’s protected from view and from weather, and the furs make for a comfortable resting place.  Dean wonders how long the angel lived here to collect so many as he drops his bag beside a pile of furs and decides to claim it as his bed.

“Did you live here with my brother?” he hears his own voice ask while his mind is still somewhere else.

“No.” Cas sets down his own bag and wanders back to the smaller cavern near the opening, where the cans are stored. “I came here afterwards.”

Afterwards. After he killed the kid and took his soul. Dean grits his teeth and doesn’t really know why, because Cas explained it to him and he knows it was probably best for Sam, and damn it, he doesn’t even _know_ Sam, and from all he’s heard the kid’s the one who drove him to say yes, so Dean doesn’t really know why he cares. Maybe it’s because he feels that everything would make a whole lot more sense if only he could talk to his brother.

“How safe is this place?” he asks, because that’s important too.

“Safe enough. There are strong wards against demons and angels and sigils that will warn me if humans are nearing. It won’t hold off an archangel who really wants to come here, but at least we’ll know if one is coming.”

“If it’s protected against angels, how come you can come here?”

“I’m not really an angel anymore. And it’s _my_ protection.”

That makes sense. Would suck to protect your own place with sigils you can’t cross. “Are there many places like this around?”

“A few.”

“How long are we staying?”

“As long as is safe.”

“That’s not helpful at all.”

“We’ll see.”

“What happened here? Why is there no one around but us?”

“It’s the apocalypse, Dean,” Cas answers in his ‘you are an idiot but I have patience’ tone. “Apocalyptic things happen, and they leave traces.”

“But there’s no destruction around.”

“Not all destruction is physical.”

“I want to speak with my brother.”

Cas drops the cans he was holding on Dean’s pile of fur. “Your brother is dead.”

“And you got his soul. I mean, he’s still around.”

“You are aware that to speak to your brother, his soul would have to get back into his body. Which is currently in Lucifer’s possession.”

“I know. I just… I mean, I’ve seen enough ghosts and spirits in my time. Can’t you just summon his soul, or something?”

“No. It’s not possible in this case. And even if it were, Lucifer would sense it. He would be here in an instant.”

Dean sits down, takes one of the cans and turns it around and around in his hands just to give his hands something to do. He doesn’t know why he’s so desperate to see his brother when even thinking about him still makes him feel physically sick.

“When did you kill him?” he finds himself asking, not wanting to talk about it any longer but unable to let it go. “How long ago, exactly? I don’t even know what year this is.”

“It’s 2232. I took Sam’s soul away in the year 2047.”

Dean calculates quickly, and he’s almost come to a result when something inside him remembers that he doesn’t even know when his brother was born – or himself for that matter. He is left with the feeling that something doesn’t quite add up, that this is too far from the time he himself lived in to make any sense. “How old was he?” he asks with a frown. “Hell, how old was _I_?”

“By date of birth you were thirty-one when you said yes,” Cas explains, and Dean almost asks what he means by that when he remembers hell and being dead. “Your brother was sixty-four.”

A memory comes to Dean, of Jena telling him it all started in the year 2010 (or so they say). If that was the year he said yes, it would mean he was born in 1979, four years before Sam. It feels right, and he decides it’s the truth. That isn’t what bothers him.

“The body Lucifer showed me didn’t look like sixty-four,” he informs Cas. “I mean, he didn’t look very good, and it’s hard to guess with how thin he was and all, but I’ll be damned if he was even thirty.”

“He wasn’t. Sam stopped aging around the time you said yes.”

“What? Why?”

“I suppose Lucifer acknowledged that Sam might not give his consent anytime soon. It might have been vanity – he didn’t want to wear an old-looking body when finally facing his older brother in your youthful form.”

Dean thinks of Lucifer, of the way he referred to the corpse on the table as ‘his’ body. The memory fills him with helpless, inexplicable rage.

“In any case, it’s easier to stop a human from aging than to reverse age, which would have been necessary had Sam lived long enough to die of old age,” Castiel adds, as if he didn’t really care. “It might have been an entirely practical precaution.”

Dean doesn’t know what to make of that, what to think. He’s tired. He wants to sleep and perhaps not wake up.

First he wants to eat, so he does. The canned food tastes like nothing good but he’s been hungry for so long and doesn’t care any more than when they ate before. Yet he wonders if this is the only thing he’ll eat for the rest of his life.

Wonders if Michael will keep him from aging too, should Cas be able to keep the soul hidden for much longer.

Wonders what would happen to him if he refused to let Michael in again. What they would do to make him. If he could win back Castiel’s respect by being like his little brother.

Something about the thought almost makes him laugh. Instead, he goes to sleep.

 

-*Interlude II*-

 

_The demons were camping in the valley below, roasting a dead boar over an open fire. Castiel remembered that demons liked to eat even though they didn’t have to, and enjoyed the things they thought they missed about being alive, even if they didn’t remember. The words of their conversations didn’t carry up all the way to where he was crouching behind a rock, but their laughter did._

_They looked like humans on a camping trip._

_In the distance, against the darkening horizon, he could make out the outline of a large farm, consisting of two main houses and three stables. There were more demons there, much more. An entire nest had taken up residence in the abandoned farm, and they had to take out these demons below them before any of them could alert the ones at the farm._

_Beside him, Sam shifted and pressed his hand to his mouth in an attempt to suppress the dry cough that shook his body. It would be unfortunate if the demons heard them. Individually, both Castiel and Sam were stronger than any of the creatures they were facing, but they were outnumbered greatly and depended on the element of surprise._

_Castiel wrapped his fingers tighter around the hilt of his sword and prepared himself for the attack. Sam stood and jumped over the rock that had hidden him, making an almost casual gesture with this right hand as he tore the first demon out of the body of its host. It didn’t take two seconds._

_Castiel jumped after him, stuck his sword into the body of the demon next to him. The demon expired in a flash of light, the human shell fell lifelessly to the ground. In the time it took to kill the creature, Sam had taken out another one._

_The first three demons died before any of the others had time to react._

_When they did, they attacked with the material weapons they carried and with mental powers that tried to fling them aside and nail them to the rocks. Castiel felt them tearing at him stronger than ever, but these demons were too powerless to harm him, even now, and around Sam their powers flowed without any effect. He was way beyond their reach._

_Eventually, there was only one more demon left. He wore the body of a middle-aged man with greying temples and a neatly trimmed beard, and a suit that didn’t fit with the camp scenery they’d found the group in. It probably was the demon’s preference rather than what the human had worn when his body was stolen. No one wore suits anymore. They weren’t practical._

_The demon, knowing his powers were useless, drew a handgun and aimed it at Sam’s head. He knew who his opponent was, of course, but Lucifer no longer discouraged harming his vessel. Death wasn’t permanent, and another few years in hell might give Sam time to think  over the devil’s offer of peace._

_But the gun was knocked from his hands by invisible forces before he could squeeze the trigger. Sam didn’t waste any time as he stepped closer and pulled the knife from his belt – the knife once given to him by the demon Ruby._

_Castiel could sense that the demon tried to escape the body he was in, smoke out and disappear into the night. Nothing happened. Sam kept him in simply by willing him to stay._

_The knife was brought to the man’s throat without hesitation, without giving him a chance to complete the stream of curses and threats that came out of the stolen mouth. (The man it belonged to was not going to survive one way or another. The body was already damaged beyond repair. Castiel couldn’t see the evidence, but he knew Sam always chose them with care.)_

_Altogether, it didn’t take five seconds before Sam’s mouth was at the demon’s neck. Castiel could see the long, skinny fingers holding the body upright twitch, see the slight jerking that went through Sam’s body as it absorbed the blood and soothed the first symptoms of withdrawal that came sooner and sooner now. When he let go, the demon slumped to the ground and Sam’s shoulders slumped in relief as the painful craving was momentarily soothed. Castiel knew he could not imagine what Sam went through every day. He had long since stopped judging his friend for his addiction._

_Seeing him like this, however, was painful. Almost more so than watching him scream his way through another withdrawal._

_When the immediate need was seated, Sam took out a flask and filled it with the blood still spilling out of the demon’s vein, then another one when it was full. They would bring him through a few days. Castiel hoped they would last long enough._

_When they were living in the camp, Sam only took demon blood when he needed it to strengthen his powers, going through detox, however painful, in between, preserving as much of his humanity as was possible under the circumstances. Now he had given up on it, giving fully in to the addiction. Castiel never tried to change his mind. Sam’s body was weak and the addiction was strong. He wouldn’t survive the withdrawal now._

_The fight, in its entirety, was brief. Not a single demon escaped, the bodies of their hosts lying around in boneless heaps. Castiel checked for vital signs out of habit and was surprised to find two still breathing, and a third one, an elderly woman, moving to climb to her feet before he could touch her. She looked around, her eyes wide and terrified, and didn’t understand._

_“What happened?” the angel heard her mutter, over and over. “What happened? What happened?”_

_“You were possessed by a demon,” he told her, walking over to steady her with a hand to her arm. Looking around quickly he found Sam standing with his back to them and seemingly unaware of their presence, staring in the direction of the farm. Good. One of the men he found alive started moving as well, the other one did not. Good. Castiel led the woman over to the man who moved, helped him up, asked him if he knew what had happened to him. As it turned out, he did. He had been possessed for a long time, and had experienced bits and pieces of the life the demon had lived in his body._

_Most of all, he had an idea where he was and would be able to find a way back to the city he came from. Castiel told him how to find a settlement where he and the woman would be protected. Their chances of making it were realistic._

_Both of them looked at him, briefly at Sam, as if expecting them to come with them and unable to understand why they wouldn’t. Why they saved them only to abandon them in the wilderness. Castiel didn’t tell them that their rescue was coincidental._

_He let them go despite their pleading looks. They both were reasonably healthy, just confused and scared. The woman would have a breakdown soon. They would be safer if Castiel and Sam came with them, but Castiel and Sam had something else to do and it couldn’t wait._

_Sam never turned around. He didn’t seem to be aware of what was going on, and for that, Castiel was glad. Sam would have wanted to protect the two of them, but he would also have known they couldn’t waste the time it would take. The decision would have tormented him, torn him apart, and he was already almost insane._

_The unconscious man on the ground would die without ever waking up. For that, too, Castiel was grateful, though he didn’t know to whom._

_The wind had picked up strength. It blew dust in their faces and clouds across the dark, brownish sky. It blew and tangled Sam’s hair as he stood unmoving, bloody knife clutched tightly in his hand. Castiel walked over to him as soon as the two humans were up the slope Castiel and Sam had jumped down and out of sight. Sam didn’t acknowledge the angel’s presence, staring straight ahead to where the nearest house of the farm was almost hidden by the drifting dust, visible only because they knew it was there. His one remaining eye was gleaming feverishly._

_“You expect any trouble?” Castiel asked._

_“I don’t know.” Sam’s voice was quiet and distracted, coming as if from far away. “No. There’s something, something… I don’t know.”_

_That wasn’t good. Sam didn’t understand his own senses. Knowing for sure would be better._

_Speaking had aggravated Sam’s throat. He coughed again, his body shaking with the force of the dry, hacking coughs that originated from the disease in his lungs. The look on his face spoke of helpless confusion. He was drifting, and Castiel needed him here and functional._

_“Sam,” he said. Sam blinked, though not at him, and started walking, his steps determined but oddly stiff. The wind got stronger, the dust it carried making Castiel cough as well, and the sand bit the skin of his face. He closed his eyes to little slits, glancing over to Sam, because his friend didn’t always have the instinct to protect himself in such simple ways._

_But Sam seemed unbothered by the sand and the dust. The wind tore at his hair and clothes, but the dirt it carried never touched his body. Castiel shuddered, reaching out tentatively with the last remnants of his former self and felt the powers surrounding Sam. The angel wasn’t sure if this was telekinesis or something else. Sam probably didn’t even realise he was doing it._

_All of a sudden, the wind stopped. It was as if a barrier had been crossed, like something was holding it back, but they were in an open field, with only a few rocks too small to offer much protection against wind that strong. The farm was before them, less than half a mile away, and it seemed to be abandoned but they knew better._

_Castiel also knew better than to go there right now, no matter how much they had to. He slid behind a rock that provided some additional protection from being spotted and pulled Sam along. The human went down without resistance, but he didn’t look at Castiel, kept his eye in the direction of their destination as if afraid he might forget where they were going otherwise, until Castiel gently took hold of his chin and forced Sam to face him._

_Sam’s skin was clammy under his fingers. The air was still too warm to be comfortable, but Sam’s body was cool, almost cold. Only the barely-healed scar on his face radiated heat even through the cloth covering his right eye. The left one eventually settled on Castiel with something like desperation in its depths._

_“Are you with me, Sam?” Castiel asked gently. Sam’s body seemed to sink into itself as he nodded slowly._

_“I’m… yes. I’m… sorry.” He looked around as if for the first time becoming aware of where they were, then hung his head and groaned, his hand coming up to press against the wound in his face. Castiel stopped him before he could, holding both hands firmly in his own. His fingers circled Sam’s wrists completely with ease._

_“Don’t touch it,” he said. “You’ll make it worse.”_

_“Hurts…” Sam told him, sounding helpless and young. He was trembling, and then he coughed again, and Castiel thought they shouldn’t be here, not when Sam was vulnerable like this. The demon blood he’d just drunk would give him the power to defend himself, but he might stand in front of a dozen attacking demons and forget why he should do so. His mind was falling apart and his body held upright only by the blood that was poisoning him. The wound that had cost him his left eye wasn’t healing. The infection that had crept into it would eventually kill him if they found no way to treat it, as would the disease in his lungs. Castiel thought back to the day he had returned from a trip outside their temporary home to see a group of demons tear at his friend, dragging his naked body across the stony field. He remembered seeing the horrible wound on his face, the other wounds on his body, and being convinced that Sam would die within the day. He remembered fighting so hard to keep him alive through shock and fevers to spare him another few years of hell._

_It had been nearly a year. Sometimes Castiel wondered if he had done Sam a favour_

_“Concentrate, Sam.” Castiel kept his voice clam and even, like a patient parent or something he had no name for. He let go of Sam’s hands and reached out to cradle his face between his palms. His thumbs brushed over Sam’s sharp cheekbones. “Hear my voice,” he murmured. “Just this. Can you follow me?”_

_Sam drew in a shaking breath, and another and another. His eye was closed. Eventually, his fingers reached up to take hold of Castiel’s wrists, gentle and familiar. They sat like this, motionless, for minutes, while Castiel continued to mutter softly. “Where are you, Sam?”_

_“Here,” Sam finally replied. “I’m here, Cas. I hear you.” He opened his eye, looking at his friend for the first time in hours. “I’m sorry.”_

_“It’s not your fault,” Castiel assured him. He kept his hands on Sam’s head until the human’s shivers subsided and he began to pull away, out of Castiel’s reach. The angel knew it wasn’t shame that made him withdraw like that but urgency, a need to finish what they had come to do. Sam had long since given up on pointless emotions like embarrassment. The constant struggle for sanity left him too exhausted to care._

_The blood he’d drunk earlier was helping him, strengthening his mind as well as his body because it took the painful craving away for a brief, merciful time. It was poison, but it was because of it that Sam was stable  enough to go through with their mission._

_Still, Castiel worried. The blood helped, but this had been a bad day to begin with. The sooner they got this over with and left, the better._

_Sam climbed to his feet with movements more certain and coordinated than before._

_“Are you sure she’s there?” Castiel asked. If she wasn’t, he would insist they left here. Attacking a demons’ nest like this was dangerous even under good circumstances – the way Sam was today, Castiel was only willing to risk this because it was an opportunity they had been waiting for for a long time and might not get again anytime soon._

_“Yes,” Sam said, and Castiel was almost disappointed._

_“There is no way you could be mistaken?” he insisted, needing to make absolutely sure. It made Sam frown at him._

_“I know it, Cas,” he said. “She’s like an itch at the back of my mind I can’t scratch, and I’ll be happy when she’s gone.” He was definitely back for the moment, and the angel accepted that right now he knew what he was talking about._

_The longer they lingered, the higher the risk of being discovered. Castiel didn’t know if the demons they had killed were expected to report back at a specific time, but he knew their chances, once again, were considerably higher if they had the element of surprise on their side. They couldn’t let the enemy suspect their presence or they would run into a trap and it would likely end with Castiel dead and Sam left in the hands of the demons, soon to be handed over to Lucifer, without protection or hope._

_Sam always seemed to worry what Castiel would do once he was gone. But Castiel wasn’t invincible and unlike Sam, he wouldn’t come back ever again. He worried how Sam would take his loss; if he would be able to hold on once he was completely alone._

_Dusk was almost over. The sky was filled with a deep red; bordering on black in places, looking like flames in others. Castiel had visited hell and knew that this didn’t look like hell at all, but he also knew that many humans imagined it did._

_Sam didn’t. He, too, knew what hell looked like, now._

_The farmhouse was a dark outline in front of that sky, but as they came closer, they could see that it didn’t look as abandoned as it had appeared from the distance. There was light in one of the windows, the glow of a candle or weak gas lamp shining through a too thin curtain. Those inside the building did nothing to conceal their presence, which might mean they didn’t know anyone was coming for them – or that they knew their presence was already known and there was no point in pretending._

_The two of them would find out soon._

_Whatever protected them from the wind that blew over the plain was working to their disadvantage since it robbed them of the dust that had hidden them before. The growing darkness fulfilled this task now, masking their approach for anyone happening to look out of the window. It would be useless to anyone else, though – what really protected them were Sam’s powers that blinded the senses of the demons and kept them ignorant as long as they were not too close._

_The building was large. It contained at least a dozen demons. Powerful ones, and Castiel once again thought that this was too dangerous, wasn’t worth the risk._

_“She’s here,” Sam muttered beside him, as if he’d read Castiel’s thoughts but speaking only to himself. “I need her to go away.”_

_The only advantage Castiel and Sam had was the fact that in their power, the demons felt untouchable. They didn’t believe that even if their location was known anyone would dare come close enough to attack. Wards kept away any angel that came this way. There were only two weapons in the possession of man known to kill demons in the world, both of them lost to the best of their knowledge. And even a hundred hunters equipped with exorcisms, salt and iron were not a threat to these creatures of hell, not in such numbers. They felt safe, and therefore did not bother to look out for any threats._

_Still, doubt remained. Castiel half-expected an attack the moment they reached the backdoor, or when they opened it, or as they slowly entered the dark room that lay behind. That nothing happened was not an assurance. He was worried for Sam more than for himself. They shouldn’t be here._

_Sam went inside first. It was Castiel who pulled the door shut, handing them over to complete darkness. He had to stop for a moment to give his eyes time to adjust to the faintest hint of light entering through the space between the floor and a distant door. The light would have been far too weak for any human eyes to do anything with, but Castiel was not human. (Was not quite that human yet.) He could use this light, but it took time._

_Sam never stopped in his steps. He moved as if through a dream, avoiding obstacles with a certainty Castiel suspected he wasn’t even aware of. By all rights, his friend should have been feeling around blindly in the dark. It was as if he had simply forgotten that he couldn’t see._

_“Thirteen,” Sam whispered, his voice just within the range of Castiel’s hearing. The angel understood. Thirteen demons in this building. Sam could sense them, now. “She’s on the other side of the house. Most of them are.”_

_Sam stopped suddenly, his hand going up to rub his forehead. Castiel could barely make out his outline; his friend’s features remained invisible to him, but he imagined pain showing on his face. “Two are right ahead.”_

_Were he human, Castiel might have been tempted to curse. Depending on the element of surprise as they were, it was important to get all the demons at once. Every demon not present when they attacked the main group would be alarmed by the unavoidable noise of the fight and most likely kill them._

_Seconds later Castiel could make out voices, one male, one female – a brief exchange of words before silence fell again. It was enough to tell Castiel where the demons were and give him hope again. The two were close, as Sam had said; probably in one of the adjoining rooms. Which meant they were far from the other end of the long building, and if Castiel and Sam were quick, managed to take them out before they made any noise, they might have a chance to make it to the main group before those demons suspected anything was wrong._

_Sam didn’t wait for Castiel to voice any of his thoughts. He pushed open the door and silently stepped into the corridor behind. Light fell through a half-open door nearby. Within seconds, Sam pushed it open all the way and lifted his hand._

_Things happened quickly after that and in a way only possible because Castiel and Sam had been together for a long time. Even with Sam’s mind struggling to focus on the present, they worked together too well for the two demons in the room to have any chance._

_If given the chance, most demons screamed when Sam burned them out of their host bodies, so Sam didn’t. He merely pressed the possessed man and woman against the wall with his powers and held them still and silent until Castiel came in and pushed his sword deep into their bodies._

_He felt sorry for the two unfortunate humans as their lifeless bodies crumbled to the floor before him. Had the circumstances been different, had Castiel and Sam been able to afford trying, they might have survived._

_Looking at Sam, Castiel couldn’t tell what he was thinking. His human friend turned away the moment the demons were dead and hurried down the corridor, towards the eleven demons that would most likely be the death of them. Castiel could only follow and hope for the best. He didn’t waste time with prayer._

_-_

_The room the demons had gathered in had two doors, and Castiel and Sam used this fact to attack from two sides. Castiel entered the room first, striking down one demon that would never learn what had ended its pathetic existence. He managed to separate the head of another from its neck before they had a chance to get over their shock, but in the end he didn’t have more than two seconds before the demons grasped the situation and threw themselves at him._

_Two seconds were enough for Sam. He came in through the backdoor when everyone’s attention was on Castiel, and the angel once again had an opportunity to see how frighteningly powerful Sam had grown through the demon blood he had been consuming regularly for nearly a year._

_But even Sam’s powers weren’t without limit. Three of the demons went out in a brief flash of light, their bodies crumbling to the ground scream even as the remaining six turned to face Sam, and for a second the angel saw real fear on the face of one of them, fury on another’s. Then another two died, burned out of their stolen bodies, but it took a little longer this time, and blood began to run from Sam’s nose. Castiel jumped forward to strike down two more demons with his sword, but before either of them could take care of the last two, one managed to slam Castiel into a cabinet hard enough for him to lose track of his surroundings for a moment._

_When he tried to climb back to his feet, he found that it wasn’t possible for him to move without causing himself a considerable amount of pain. Castiel had grown accustomed to the sensation over the years. He knew it was his body’s way of telling him something was wrong, and had learned to decipher the messages better than most humans could. He had also learned to ignore it when it had to be ignored, In this case, there was nothing he could do to lessen the pain or help his body heal, and his work here wasn’t done. Paying attention to the pain held no use. However, he found that the pain movement caused him was too strong to stand straight or walk normally._

_Castiel realised that his part in this fight was over. If Sam could not take out the last demons on his own, all was lost._

_A fleeting feeling of despair washed over the fallen angel; perhaps something like fear. When he looked up, though, he saw that only one demon was standing anymore, and even this one was only held upright by Sam’s powers pinning it against a wall._

_The demon sneered, looking furious, but Castiel could see the fear on the stolen face as well. This one was wearing a woman, with long, ash-blonde hair showing the first streaks of grey, and a tight, revealing outfit around a slim, tightly muscled body. The demon inside was old, powerful, had escaped from hell a long time ago and gone through human bodies like suits. Castiel and Sam knew her as ‘Meg’._

_Sam was still standing at the other side of the room, as if reluctant to step closer. His hand was still raised, half-closed to a fist and threatening to squeeze the essence out of her any moment, but he didn’t yet. As his vision cleared, Castiel could see that his friend was pale, covered in sweat, and that he was swaying on his feet._

_“Why, if it isn’t little Sammy Winchester,” Meg said with a forced grin. “Fancy meeting you here. I see you got stronger since we last met. Didn’t think you’d be stupid enough to attack a so many demons of our pay grade at once, though.”_

_“We’re still alive and you’re not doing so well over there,” Sam replied with a twitch of his lips that was either an attempt to grin or a grimace. “So obviously, you’re the stupid one for letting yourself be attacked.” He exhaled sharply. “Or letting me know where you were in the first place,” he added nastily._

_Meg’s face darkened and Castiel could feel an outburst of her demonic power like a knife through his brain. She struggled to break the hold Sam had on her, furious with him and the world, and with herself for opening this door so long ago._

_“Tell me,” she hissed when her struggle chased. “How does it feel to voluntarily turn into one of us, Sammy? Are you so far gone that you can exorcise yourself yet?”_

_Sam didn’t take the bite. He was long since beyond caring, had given up on himself when he realised that he couldn’t save himself and everyone else as well, and that had been easy because he’d been there before and this time there was nothing to stay human for._

_Castiel hadn’t been there when Dean said yes. He had wondered often if his presence would have made a difference, but knew better than to believe he had any influence on a Winchester who had made up his mind. (He wondered if that absolved him of any guilt.)_

_“Why don’t we find out?” Sam replied to Meg’s question. “I’ll just test it on you first, if you don’t mind.”_

_“You’ll send me to hell?” Meg laughed. “Out of juice already, Sammy? And here I thought you were going to finally kill me.”_

_“I can do that if you want me to. But I thought I’d be fair and offer you a choice.” Sam finally took a step closer. “You go back to hell and have to fight your way back out, or I kill you, and that’s it. Your choice.”_

_“So merciful today, Sweetie,” Meg said acidly. “I can’t say I really want to go back to hell, for however short a time – it’s just no fun being there. But, oh…” Her face lit up as if she just had a brilliant realisation. “You know that, right? I haven’t been there in a long time, but one hears things. Such_ fun _things. Kinda did tempt me to take the risk and go down for a weekend, just to watch the show.”_

_“So you made your choice, then?” Castiel pressed out between clenched teeth. “Annihilation it is?”_

_Meg turned her head to look at him and threw him a grimace that might have been intended to be a smile, as if noticing his presence for the first time. “Cassy!” she called out in fake delight. “You’re still hanging out with the losing team? Well,” she corrected herself. “I say team, but I don’t think the word qualifies for the two of you, do you? I mean, it’s not like there’s anyone else fighting on your side, now dear Dean saw the light and beloved Bobby kicked the bucket…” Her speech ended in a sharp breath and then a pained yell, as Sam closed his fist a little further._

_“Ouch,” the Demon said when she could. “Touchy subject, is it?”_

_“Make your choice, bitch,” Sam growled. He swayed a little on his feet, but recovered his balance in a second. “Or I’ll make it for you.”_

_“Cute, Sammy,” Meg commented. “As much as I want to believe that you want to spare me out of fondness for all the sweet memories we share, I can’t help but think that you want something from me.”_

_“Hezariel,” Sam said simply._

_A grin slowly spread over the demon’s face. “Ah._ That _. Figures.”_

_“You tore an angel from his vessel,” Castiel pointed out. “Tell us how you did it, and we will spare your life.”_

_“And send me back for another century of suffering?” Meg spat. “We end up back on the rack we escaped from when we’re exorcised, Fluffball. It’ll take me ages to get out.”_

_“That’s the idea,” Sam told her. “We don’t want you here. This is the way of getting rid of you you’ll actually survive.”_

_“You’ll have to do better than that, Sammy,” the demon spat. “I’d rather die than have you send me back. Again.”_

_“I know demons. You cherish survival over anything. You’ll do anything to keep your rotten, parasitic existence.”_

_“Yeah? You think you know me so well?”_

_In reply, Sam tightened his fist again. Meg’s body began to glow, the demon inside becoming visible as it started to burn away._

_She let out a long scream of agony and rage, but once Sam withdrew his power, it turned into nearly hysterical laughter._

_“You’re not going to do it,” she yelled. “You want to get Dean back so badly you won’t kill me!”_

_“If you don’t speak, you’re worthless to us and we’ll lose nothing by eliminating you,” Castiel pointed out. He threw a worried glance at his friend, who swayed again and didn’t seem to stop this time. He didn’t know how long Sam could keep holding her._

_“I have another suggestion,” Meg said. “I’ll tell you if you let me go.”_

_“How about you tell us and then we’ll decide if the information is worth it?” Sam suggested back._

_“Sorry, Honey, you’ll have to take the risk.” Meg smiled sweetly. Sam opened his mouth to reply, but whatever he wanted to say was drowned out by a new fit of coughing._

_It offered the chance Meg had been waiting for. Castiel felt her powers flare up again, but before he could react in any way, he was slammed against the wall once again and the world exploded in pain. It took him seconds to regain his bearings, and when he did, Sam was lying on the floor with Meg sitting on top of him, a knife at his throat. It cut into his skin when he continued to cough helplessly._

_“That doesn’t sound good at all, Sammy,” Meg commented. “Guess it won’t take long until you come home to us. Almost makes me think what I’m about to do will be a mercy.” She smiled broadly. “But that’s what friends are for, right? Think of me when you come back.” She didn’t cut his throat yet, though, but waited while Sam’s violent coughs continued until blood was specking his lips._

_“Of course, the coming back part doesn’t go for the de-feathered chicken over there,” Meg continued and turned her attention to Castiel who was still trying to get back to his feet. “Just so you know,” she told him, “I want you to appreciate, before I kill you, that you’re dying for nothing. The spell that exorcised Hezariel was made centuries ago specifically for him, and only worked because he was half-fallen anyway. It wouldn’t impress Michael very much.” She shrugged. “Too bad for you.”_

_The next second she was thrown back and Sam was on her, holding her down by her shoulders while she shrieked beneath him as she burned._

_Demons always had to talk too much, gloat for too long. Castiel had come to appreciate that on occasion._

_Before the demon was gone, though, Sam faltered again. He didn’t let go of Meg completely, but his attack stopped as he first froze, and then pressed a hand to his head and squeezed his eye shut as what little colour remained in his face drained away._

_“No,” he whispered. “No, no.”_

_“Sam?” Castiel came over as quickly as the pain allowed him, his sword in his hand, trying to keep his eyes at the same time on his friend and his enemy. “What is it?” This could be another episode, perhaps a side effect of having used too much power at once, and Castiel almost hoped it was, because the alternative…_

_“Lucifer,” Sam gasped. “He’s here.”_

_Castiel cursed in a way that reminded him of Dean whenever he had time to spare for heartbreak. Beneath Sam, Meg started laughing, the shock and fear on her face replaced once again by triumph. “I knew he wouldn’t let me die! I’m his most faithful servant! Hey Cas, looks like you’re going to die today anyway. And Sammy will get to know true suffering.” Her stolen face was radiant with fatalistic belief, right until the moment Castiel lifted his sword and stuck it between her ribs._

_She was useless to them, and they had no more time to waste._

_Sam collapsed to the floor the moment she died, but Castiel couldn’t tell if he’d even noticed the end of one of his oldest adversaries. He was clutching his head, looking as if he was about to throw up, and Castiel was clutching his shoulders, trying to pull him to his feet. They needed to leave, now!_

_After a second, Sam regained control over his body and got up, hurrying away before he was completely upright. He headed towards the back of the house and Castiel knew Lucifer was nearing from the other direction. He hoped that the storm was still blowing outside, that the dust would hide them quick enough to escape._

_Perhaps they had been naïve to assume that the sudden death of a dozen of his most powerful followers wouldn’t come to the devil’s attention._

_They were almost out of the door when Castiel realised that Sam never truly got upright but remained hunched over, much like Castiel himself, whose injuries didn’t allow for his usual range of motion. He wondered, as they ran, if his friend had been hurt when Meg attacked him, if this was overexertion or his illness, if it was bad._

_It was. Before they made it more than ten yards from the house, Sam stumbled and collapsed. He tried to get up again and failed. Kept trying even as new coughs wracked his thin body and blood ran in a dark line down his chin, but his legs refused to carry him. Castiel tried to help, but all he managed was to pull Sam up enough to fall heavily back into the dust._

_Desperate, Castiel threw a look back at the house. He couldn’t see anyone following them yet, but Lucifer and whoever he had with him was coming, and neither the darkness nor the dust were thick enough to hide them._

_Sam made another attempt at getting up only to fail again, and this time he screamed in pain and desperation when he hit the ground._

_Castiel read naked fear on his friend’s face. Sam couldn’t move, he simply couldn’t._

_He couldn’t get away._

_Ignoring his own injuries, Castiel slid his hands under Sam’s arms and began dragging him forward, driven by the sole thought that they had to get away, away. But his own injuries would not be ignored. Pain shot through him with every step, every breath, and soon it became crippling. Had he been healthy, Castiel could have carried Sam without effort. Now he could only let him fall and try not to fall with him._

_They were not even close to the storm and its dust and noise, still in the bubble of eerie silence around the farm, but even so Castiel needed a moment to register the strangled word Sam was forcing out between clenched teeth over the pounding of blood in his ears._

_“Run,” Sam said, ordered, asked of him._

_Castiel shook his head. “I won’t leave you here,” he declared. “If Lucifer gets you…”_

_“If Lucifer gets_ you _,” Sam interrupted him, his voice a series of painful gasps, “he won’t kill you. Not at once.”_

_As much as Castiel hated it, Sam was right, and as much as he wanted to, it wasn’t something he could afford to ignore. If Sam was taken now, he would suffer at the hands of Lucifer’s minions, die and go to hell, come back and suffer more until he said yes or Castiel managed to free him. If Castiel was taken with him, Lucifer himself would torture him, take him apart piece by piece while Sam had to watch, always offering to stop if only Sam let him in. And Sam wouldn’t, and it would destroy him a little more, maybe a little too much._

_It would also take away his last friend and only hope of escape._

_Torn and out of time, Castiel gazed from Sam to the house and then to the darkness ahead of him and wished Dean were here._

 


	6. Chapter 6

The days they spend in the cave offer a welcome break. Dean’s feet start hurting like a bitch the first morning he wakes up on the bed of furs, for the first time in his active memory truly rested. He slept like a stone (or a corpse) without waking up once, and the furs kept him warm through the night. Even after waking up he lingers under them, holding on to the cosy, thoughtless emptiness inside him for as long as he can. Eventually, nature’s call forces him to move and as soon as he stands, his feet tell him that they are finally fed up with all the walking.

He wonders if things have always been like this for him: having no problem to keep going with little rest, food and comfort for a long time, only to feel the strain as soon as he has a moment to recover. It seems to speak of a body well adjusted to a stressful life.

Logically, he’d assume that he could be rid of all pains and the suddenly crushing weight of exhaustion – or at least be able to ignore them once more – simply by hitting the road again this moment. But for now, as he stumbles out of the cave in search of a good place to relieve himself, Dean is willing to take the long road to recovery, and enjoy the thought of not having to be cold, tired and hungry for a few days.

Not having to fear for his life for once is also a welcome bonus. If asked, he couldn’t tell why, but he feels safer here than he did anywhere else, including the settlements with their company and their simple comforts.

Outside the cave he finds Castiel. The angel is sitting with his back to the entrance, but whether he’s watching the valley below or simply looking at it, Dean can’t tell.

He also doesn’t know if the fallen angel slept at all or if he kept watch all through the night while Dean rested, once again.

He looks less tired than he did before. Dean never really paid attention to what Castiel looked like except for ‘unkempt’ and ‘unshaven’, usually with a healthy dose of ‘unwashed’ – pretty much like Dean himself. But he sees the difference, notices the exhausted tension only now it’s… not gone, but lessened.

He never cared about Cas’ mental and physical state before because he was too busy alternately being frustrated with or angry at him and trying to figure out if he can trust him. Even now Dean doesn’t really care, because he’s too busy needing to piss.

Castiel doesn’t seem to care much about Dean either, at least not enough to spare him more than a glance in greeting. Dean doesn’t care right back, but he returns to his not-so-heavenly guide once he does his business and sits beside him so they can stare at the valley together.

It’s green. The grass looks healthy, and is sprinkled with flowers. Dean can’t see the forest they crossed to get to this place, but the trees that grow at the edges of the meadows are full of thick green leaves.

“It looks like summer,” Dean hears himself say. It doesn’t feel like it, though – it’s too cold, even here.

He wonders if any of those trees carry fruit.

Castiel doesn’t answer, but Dean is distracted anyway by the feeling of sadness, almost desperation, that washes over him. The world he sees doesn’t really exist anymore. It died long ago, and unlike him, it’ll never be resurrected.

“It’s hard to believe the world already ended when you see this,” Dean can’t help noting, maybe only to fill the silence with something other than the voices of distant birds that sing only here.

This time, Cas does answer. “There is no human being here but us,” he says.

 

-

 

The exhaustion never entirely vanishes from Castiel’s face; not after one night in a safe place, and not after four. The thin line around his mouth never disappears, but if that one is a sign of the stress of recent days or a permanent fixture, it’s hard to tell. Perhaps Dean only notices it because he never saw it in the face he can’t remember from so long ago.

They don’t speak much. Dean still has so many questions, so many doubts, but he doesn’t want to think about the things he’s lost and the guilt he seems to carry so he doesn’t ask. He still thinks about it. It’s impossible to stop. Sometimes, he almost misses the simplicity of walking, of listening for any sound, since it sometimes left him too exhausted to think.

Sometimes he wishes for the oblivion offered by a couple of strong drinks – craves it, actually, and that feels strange when by all rights he shouldn’t even know what alcohol _is_.

He dreams more now. Michael never comes to him, which might or might not be thanks to the sigils that protect this place, but his mind is never shy to fill his nights with pictures on its own.

He rarely remembers his dreams, though. He knows they are bad, wakes up with his heart racing and sometimes wet traces on his face that he’s forever going to deny. One night he’s filled with mindless terror, another with crushing grief when he opens his eyes and tries to remember where he is, forgetting for one moment that he doesn’t remember anything else. He supposes he might be dreaming of hell and can, absurdly, only hope it’s his own hell he’s dreaming of.

One time he wakes up in the watery light of early morning to see Castiel sitting at the foot of his makeshift bed, looking at him with his head crooked to the side, reminding Dean more than anything else of a bird. He leaves before Dean can say anything, but the idea that the angel could be watching him sleep every night is enough to thoroughly creep him out.

When he wakes up the next night, however, Cas is sleeping soundly and doesn’t even stir when Dean stumbles outside to throw up. He doesn’t in the end, but he comes close, and fears the moment when whatever he dreams of at night will begin to make sense to him.

When he doesn’t dream, his sleep is deep and healthy. His feet and muscles stop hurting after three days. The cans Cas has stored inside the cave could probably get them through an entire year. The food they offer isn’t tasty, but as it turns out the trees in the valley do carry fruits, and on the third day Castiel leaves for a few hours and comes back with a freshly killed boar. As food goes, this place is probably as close to paradise as this world can get anymore.

Dean wished for a place like this when they were walking. Now they are here, it only takes three days to drive him crazy. Because he can’t stop thinking no matter how much he wants to. So he thinks all the time about Michael and Lucifer, the decisions he made and the world he created, but never about his brother. Whenever his thoughts stray in that direction, he feels sick and nervous, like there’s an itch in his brain he can’t scratch and it makes him want to scream and punch things until he passes out and can’t think anymore. It’s like everything relating to his brother in his mind is covered in oil and he slips off whenever he tries to contemplate it. His thoughts refuse to focus.

And yet it’s always there, constantly in the back of his mind, less a thought than an awareness, leaving him restless and nearly desperate. It makes relaxing nearly impossible.

He doesn’t know if there is a possibility at all of ending this war without killing what is left of the world, or if there is anything useful they can do in general. But Dean knows he has to try. People are suffering, bad things are happening (because of him), and that means he can’t sit around and be generally better off than anyone else. Not if he could be out there and try to help and fight and make it better, chances or not.

Something inside him won’t let him. He suspects that this might be why he (they) spent all his life (their lives) on the road.

By the time it becomes unbearable, they have been in the cave for about a week, and Dean and Castiel haven’t had a conversation that runs deeper than what’s for dinner in almost as long. There’s still so much Dean wants to know about this world and his own history, but talking to Castiel is frustrating and exhausting and always leaves him feeling bad about himself. He finds he doesn’t really want to ask what happened to kill every human being in this area without leaving a trace because he fears he would find it a lot less peaceful and safe here if he knew. Most of all, though, he doesn’t want or think and talk about his brother but can’t seem to care about anything else.

He goes to Castiel on the sixth day of their stay, when nothing hurts anymore and he hasn’t been hungry or thirsty in a while and is getting used to not being cold at night. As usual, Cas is outside the cave where he prefers to be most of the time, tanning the skin of the boar he killed three days before. He looks up when Dean approaches, looking him over carefully as if searching for something – or finding something confirmed.

“We will leave tomorrow,” he says eventually. “We shouldn’t stay in one place for too long anyway.”

“You think Michael would come here if they knew where we are? Or Lucifer?”

“I think they know they don’t have to.”

He’s probably right. Whoever really wants to find them will, and angel-repelling symbols aren’t going to stop a determined archangel – or someone with a huge number of human followers. Worse – the many people and creatures who want to find them have better chances now Dean is with Castiel, creating something like a direct line to Michael. The two of them are only safe here, or anywhere, as long as they don’t linger long enough for everyone else to become impatient.

However, Dean is very certain that this is not the only reason why they have to keep moving. Castiel has to be going somewhere. He can’t imagine the fallen angel spent the last fifteen decades just running away, or that he plans to keep doing so until Dean drops dead from old age.

Provided he’s still aging and won’t end up like…

Mostly, Dean can’t imagine Cas not wanting to go and _do something_ about all of this, if only because he can’t imagine _himself_ not trying.

“Where are we going next?” he asks, and what he really means is, _What are we going to do now?_

Cas, for once, seems to understand that, if the long pause before he answers is anything to go by. Dean can practically see the internal battle on his face as he contemplates whether or not to tell him what he has in mind.

He steels himself for punching the angel in the face should he receive no better answer than “Kansas” or “Detroit” or something along those lines.

“We’re going to continue working towards the goal I have been aiming for since this war started,” Castiel finally says. “Find a way to kill Lucifer.”

And if that doesn’t sound promising!

“If you absolutely need a purpose,” Cas adds, and that takes away a little of the promise.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Dean has really begun to hate constantly having to ask this question.

“You shouldn’t get too exited about it,” Cas explains. “We – you, me, Sam and some others – have been trying to find a way to kill Lucifer ever since he was released from his prison. We failed to do so before we lost you, and even though Sam and I kept trying after that we never found anything useful. There were some promising leads but they all led nowhere. People died for nothing. I have continued looking for a way in the years I was alone.”

Dean realises where this is going, and it’s not exactly encouraging. “And you got nowhere with it.”

It annoys him that he can’t tell if the look Cas throws him is annoyed or amused.

“As you saw for yourself, Lucifer is still around.”

“All those years, and you don’t even have an idea? What exactly were you doing all the time?”

“Running,” Castiel reminds him. “And looking for a way to separate you from Michael.” If he wanted to shut Dean up, this was the way to go. After a few seconds, Castiel adds, as if to comfort him, “At least now I don’t need to waste time on that anymore.”

A waste of time, huh? Not for the first time, Dean wonders if Cas ever really wanted him back or it he just tried for his brother’s sake. After all the angel told him, it’s obvious that he carries a grudge, and judging just by what he was told, Dean can see why he would. Yet he still doesn’t know the whole story, and he’s decided that a full-blown guilt trip will have to wait until he remembers everything and learns about his own motivations from his own point of view.

Or rather, something inside him seems to have decided that. Dean actually thinks that based on everything he knows a little more guilt would be in order. Not that he doesn’t feel bad about himself already, but it could be worse and maybe it _should_ be worse. But the guilt won’t come and his mind won’t go there.

Perhaps because it knows that once the floodgates have been opened, nothing is going to save him from drowning.

And he’s left wondering once again if he even wants his memories back. Answers would be nice, not having to constantly doubt himself would be nice, and knowing who to trust would be awesome – but he’s beginning to fear that the price will be too high.

Well. Killing the Devil sounds like a plan, at least – even if an actual plan seems nowhere to be found here. It’s better than running around aimlessly for the rest of eternity, in any case, and who knows – maybe they’ll actually make it.

Dean imagines that a lot of people have tried before them, and obviously no one succeeded. He doesn’t exactly know why he and Cas should have better chances, but Cas used to be an angel and must have some insight other people don’t, and Dean used to be Michael’s vessel, which has to count for _something_.

Even if he has no idea for what. He’s trying to stay positive, here, since that’s a lot better than going at things with a ‘doesn’t matter, we’re going to fail anyway’ mindset.

“Please tell me you have an idea how to go at this that goes beyond asking random people if they happen to know how to kill Satan,” he says. “Because if that’s what you’ve been doing so far, you must have noticed by now that that doesn’t work so well.”

“I already know how to kill Lucifer,” Castiel tells him, causing Dean’s eyebrows to climb towards his hairline.

“Didn’t you just tell me you didn’t? If you know, what the fuck have you been waiting for?”

Cas stops what he is doing in order to throw Dean an impatient glance. “There are ways to kill angels, and of course I know them. An angel’s blade is an effective weapon against my kind. But only the blade of an archangel can kill another archangel.”

“Like Lucifer.” Dean nods his understanding. “And you don’t know where to get one.”

“That is one of the problems.”

“What about the other archangels? I know Michael isn’t too keen on ending this the easy way, but the others…”

“Raphael is on Michael’s side, without reservations,” Castiel interrupts him. “He will do things by the book – and he would kill me on sight should I approach him. And Gabriel has turned his back on heaven long before this war started. He doesn’t want to fight for either side. We have nothing to expect from him even if we could find him.”

“Great. And what’s the good news?”

“Even if we had a blade that could harm the devil,” Cas continues calmly, “I wouldn’t have a chance to get near enough to kill him. Neither would you, for that matter. Even if he weren’t so well protected, Lucifer is too powerful. Only Michael would have a chance to kill him.”

“It keeps getting better. So what’s the plan?”

Castiel sighs and Dean realises he doesn’t want to give any more information. Maybe because he _has_ no plan. It seems impossible after two hundred years of having a chance to think about it, but one has to wonder. Cas doesn’t seem to be the organized type. (Dean wonders how Sam managed not to go crazy with him.)

“No plan, then? I see. I guess we’ll just run around and hope for a miracle then.” Dean turns around to get back into the cave, collect things he’ll need for the next several weeks, or months, or years, or however long this is going to take. To his surprise he finds that even with the prospect of going absolutely nowhere he can’t wait to start.

Maybe he doesn’t really believe Cas doesn’t have a plan.

Dean stops and turns back to his maybe-friend, who’s still doing exactly what he did before. Cas won’t finish this skin until tomorrow, he thinks. “Just tell me if there actually is a chance, however small, that we’ll kill the devil.”

Castiel sets down his tool, but he doesn’t look at Dean. “Yes,” he finally says. “We can do it. Because we have to.”

Dean leaves it at that, though it answers nothing. He doesn’t even know if killing Lucifer will actually help this world much. The biggest evil will be gone, sure, and any chance for Lucifer and Michael to eradicate the world in their epic bitch fight. But he doubts that the demons will simply all shut up and peacefully go back to hell. And maybe the angels will accept that the whole thing is over and fuck off to heaven. But Dean kind of suspects that if they manage to kill Lucifer after Michael refused to kill his brother for so long simply because he wanted to do it right, the damn archangel is going to be pissed. He seems like the kind of guy to carry a grudge.

He’s seen the devastation that came from Michael being merely impatient. He doesn’t want to know what remains of the world when he gets really angry.

So maybe they’ll have to kill Michael as well. And all angels and demons that remain, while they’re at it.

Maybe stagnation would be better. Keep things the way they are – the people are used to the situation, have learned to live with it, never knew anything else, and the situation sucks, but surely it’s still better than everyone dying.

And of course, that’s all a load of bullshit. A world that may go down in a blast but also has a chance for improvement, however slowly, is always better than a world that is guaranteed to always be terrible and will probably end in a blast one day anyway.

And even if things remain crappy for mankind after the war is over, at least Dean’s brother will be safe then (and maybe that’s the most important thing of all). With Lucifer gone, no one has a reason to try and torture the kid into saying Yes anymore and he can finally come back to life and to Dean and maybe, maybe everything will be alright then. Dean feels like everything will be okay if only he’ll get his brother back. (Nothing will be okay if he doesn’t.)

His heart, inexplicably, beats a little faster when he roams through the cave to collect his things.

 

-

 

To Dean’s surprise, Castiel does manage to finish the skin he was working on, though why he bothered remains a mystery, since there are enough skins and furs to choose from already in the cave. There are even some simple clothes that don’t fit very well and don’t speak of great talent for sewing but offer an alternative to wearing the same set of clothes day in and day out. Both Dean and Castiel made use of the opportunity to wash what they were wearing on the journey during their break, which already confronted Dean with the need to test Cas’ self-made collection and declare it uncomfortable to wear. He’s not looking forward to doing so more often, but it beats the alternative of walking around naked every now and then.

They pack what is left of the boar, fill up their water bottles and as many cans as they can carry. Hidden weapons Castiel doesn’t have on offer in his cave, but their guns and Cas’ angel-killing sword will do, as long as they don’t run out of ammunition for the projectile weapons. Not that they have had to use them so far, but when they have to, Dean would like to know he doesn’t have to hold back due to supply shortage.

The one weapon Castiel adds to their collection is an obviously self-made but quite impressive looking bow and a bunch of arrows. It’ll help them hunt larger animals without giving their position away with the sound of a gunshot, he explains as he fastens the bow to his back. Dean refrains from making a comment about cupids, but it’s hard.

They roll everything they take with them into some skins and furs that shall keep them warm at night and bind then closed with the same rope they use to carry them comfortably.

“Where were you before you came to fetch me?” Dean asks when they are done and ready to go. The thought came to him when they were packing, because when Castiel came to him, he had nothing with him but the clothes he was wearing and his sword. Wherever he was, he must have dropped everything and left at once.

“I was in a city a few days’ march away from where I found you. Looking for supplies for the camp I intended to stay in for a while.”

Dean tries to imagine living like that, for centuries. “You really don’t like company, do you?”

“Getting involved with other people would have led to discovery sooner or later,” Castiel reminds him mildly. “At the very least it would have endangered those I dealt with.”

“So no sex, huh?” Dean doesn’t know why this is the first thing his mind jumps to. Perhaps it distracts him from how depressingly lonely Castiel’s life must have been. (Or perhaps the thought of centuries without sex really, really creeps him out.)

(He finds he’d kind of like to have sex again at one point. Just not necessarily with Cas.)

“Not for a very long time.” Something like a smile plays around the other’s lips. Apparently he considers this topic harmless enough to relax a little bit. “It wasn’t a difficult sacrifice to make. Before I fell, I never had sex at all.”

“Well, I never had sex either before I hit puberty, and yet I wouldn’t want to go without it for two hundred years,” Dean points out, though he suspects with a fallen angel things are a little bit different.

“I don’t think falling from grace can be compared to hitting puberty,” Cas confirms, despite his claim of being incapable of reading Dean’s mind.

“The parents of many a teenager would disagree with you.” Dean grins. “Seriously, you don’t miss it at all?”

“It was a nice way of spending the time,” Cas admits. “Otherwise I wouldn’t have participated in the act more than once. However, it was hardly addictive, and opportunities rarely presented themselves after we left the camp we had lived in for years. Even before Sam died, our life has been mostly nomadic.”

Dean nearly makes a comment about his little brother and his obvious lack of a sex life, but the sudden memory of what Michael had done to the kid shut him up. “Sounds exiting,” he says, somewhat lamely. “What did you do all day, if you weren’t wandering around?”

“We sought a way to separate you and Michael. It required a lot of travelling to get to various sources of information, but as you know, we never succeeded. There were some dead end traces, though, that kept us occupied. Also, we fought demons were we found them and angels where we had to. We avoided those were we could, though, because Sam had little way of defending himself from them. Sometimes we stayed at settlements for a while and helped the people there while we recovered our strength. We never stayed long.”

It sounds… incredibly bleak. “Guess that lifestyle doesn’t leave room for anything fun, huh?”

Castiel shoulders his bag and shoves his gun into the holster under his jacket after checking it over one more time with practiced movements. “We had good times, too,” he says softly, as if sensing Dean’s need for something positive in those days he had nothing to do with besides causing them and deciding to be nice for once. “There wasn’t always something to hunt, and sometimes we managed to avoid detection for a long time and were able to stay in one place long enough to rest. The other humans we stayed with from time to time offered some distraction as well if there was nothing for us to fight.”

So basically, they were taking some time off for themselves whenever lack of anything else to do forced it on them. It doesn’t really sound impressive, but at least they did get a chance to relax every now and then.

Dean should have left it at that, but as they wander down the slope and leave the cave that has been their home for the past week behind without another glance, he has to ask, because he has to know how rebels during the apocalypse spend their free time.

“What’s your idea of a good time? Besides sex, of course.” Dean suddenly wonders if Cas ever did it with his brother in all the time they were on their own and shudders internally. Cas never gave the impression of seeing his friend as anything but that but, well, desperate times and all that. “I mean, what did you two do if it was just you?” he clarifies further and really hopes the answer isn’t Sex.

“Play cards,” Cas offers. He doesn’t shrug, but Dean can hear the shrug in his voice. “Talk. Read.”

It doesn’t sound terribly exiting, but then, their lives were exiting enough. They probably were grateful for every boring day.

And then Cas just has to add, “If Sam was well enough for any of that.” And that’s why Dean should have left well enough alone. Leave it to a goddamn angel to constantly remind him that his little brother has been so messed up by torture and addictions that he didn’t get a moment of peace even if no one was currently out to skin him alive.

For a moment anger washes over Dean, so deep it takes his breath away. Suddenly, he wants to punch and throttle Castiel and yell at him for not protecting Sam from all that, and at the same time he hates himself with a passion he didn’t think possible because that would have been his job, and he didn’t do it, he fucking _didn’t_.

The moment passes and the hate is gone as quickly as it came, leaving Dean to wonder if it had ever been there in the first place.

( _“As long as I’m around, nothing bad’s gonna happen to you.”_ )

He stays half a step behind Castiel and doesn’t say anything else until they stop for the night.

 

-

 

They don’t leave the area the way they came, but they walk more or less in the general direction of the forest they crossed to reach this place, only a little more east. It makes Dean wonder how much further this strangely alive and empty place continues in the other direction. He imagines it stretching on forever and doesn’t understand why the thought makes him shiver.

They have to pass through a forest again to get back to the dust and devastation of the world they left behind. Maybe it’s the same forest – it seems to serve as a natural border between one world and the other. But it appears to be not as thick in this place and contains more rocks. The narrow river Dean and Castiel were following all the way from the cave continues between the trees and soon becomes invisible inside the green, as if the forest were eating it.

They reach the first trees when the sun behind the eternal shroud of clouds is just beginning to set. It’s too early for setting camp for the night, but Dean remembers Castiel insistence’s of crossing the forest before nightfall on their way in and doesn’t complain. Just looking at those trees gives him the creeps, and he doesn’t even know why.

Before, on their travels, they both used to be too exhausted to do anything once they stopped for the night. But after days of resting and not that long a walk, Dean is far from tired and filled with a nervous energy that might by fuelled by his desire to distract himself from the evil territory merely a stone’s throw away.

“I don’t suppose you have a card game with you now?” he asks while Cas settles on his spread furs and spectacularly fails to act like he isn’t watching the trees.

To Dean’s considerable surprise, he does carry a stack of cards with him. They are old and damaged and obviously self-made. Whoever drew the markings and pictures on them wasn’t a great artist, and they lack colour, but they do their job.

They also leave Dean wondering how many solitary games Cas has invented in the past dozen decades.

 

-

 

Just like the first time they did it, nothing at all happens to them inside the forest. It doesn’t even take as long as Dean thought it would – they make it to the other side in less than two hours, which means they probably could have gone the day before and be out before nightfall. But obviously, Cas didn’t want to take the risk. Dean doesn’t have it in him to mind.

Impatient as he’s been to leave, Dean finds himself missing the cave and the security it offered in the first night outside, when he can’t sleep for every noise he hears freaking him out. Not even Castiel keeping vigil beside him makes him feel any better. He is almost glad when it’s his turn to take over watch, since then his nervousness actually becomes useful.

Cas either slept like a corpse, or pretended to be a corpse while listening to every noise just as Dean was.

Or he listened to every noise while pretending to be a corpse so whatever might come after them would attack Dean first. You never know. Angels are sneaky like that.

Once they make it to the other side, it feels like they just came back to the real world. Dean wonders if there is something wrong with seeing it like that. He supposes that, coming from a world not destroyed and having missed practically all of the way down, he should think of this world as a nightmare and set the pretty (if dead) world they just left as the norm. He doesn’t, though. Perhaps his world has simply always been crappy and this just feels kind of fitting.

It’s still a shock, coming back. It isn’t like he’s forgotten the destruction, the empty ruins, but even his memory couldn’t compete with the real thing. In the end it’s less like he wakes from a dream and more like he’s forcefully pulled from a dream by a bucket of cold water on his face to find that the house is on fire.

So they make their way across yet another devastated plain full of rubble in search of a fire extinguisher.

Dean doesn’t even know what state they’re in. Somehow, he doubts it’s still Georgia. It’s funny – in a way that’s giving him a headache – that he can name every single state of the Unites States and most major cities, could find them on a map without having to search if any map still existed, but has absolutely no recollection of ever having been in any of them.

They went mostly west after leaving the remains of Atlanta, so now they’re probably in Alabama. Dean grimaces. He never liked Alabama, and that’s probably to do with something bad happening at an impressionable time in his life that still bothers him even if he’s forgotten all about it. Isn’t it typical that his memory is randomly selective like this? He can’t remember the name of his favourite song, or what his father looked like, but by God, he knows that he doesn’t like Alabama.

Well. In the hours and hours spend walking through a land alternating nothing and nothing with dirt, Dean finds it confirmed that Alabama kind of sucks.

If this even is Alabama. He could be wrong about that after all. But if it is Alabama, then the ruins of the city that show up as outlines in front of the darkening sky near the end of their second day after crossing the forest might be Montgomery.

Or any other big city in that state.

Dean doesn’t get to find out that day. They find a long stretch of even ground that turns out to be a street hidden under dust and dirt, but the one crippled road sign they come across is unreadable. And even if they find anyone inside the city, Dean somewhat doubts that anyone still remembers its name.

Okay, so Pam knew where Chicago was. But then, that’s not in Alabama.

“Hey, Cas,” he asks as they settle down for the night in the questionable shelter of a stretch of ragged and broken road. “Has my world always been crappy? Not like this, just, you know. Did it suck?”

Cas snorts softly. “Yes, it did.” He unfolds the boar skin in which he keeps the dried meat. “It wasn’t all bad, though,” he adds as he hands Dean a slice.

They haven’t been holding back on the meat so far. The cold weather is doing them a favour in this regard, but even with these low temperatures the meat won’t stay edible forever and there is no point in trying to stretch the supplies only to end up throwing away half of it.

For once, Dean simply accepts Cas’ words and the food and they eat in silence, at least one of them thinking ruefully about the days after their supplies of expiring food have run out and they have to get back to being hungry almost all the time.

 

-

 

There are strange dreams that night. Nothing that has him waking up in a cold sweat, but strange none the less. Unsettling, maybe, but probably not even that.

Dean gets the feeling sometimes that he isn’t very good with words.

“I dreamt of zombies tonight,” he informs Cas the next morning, when they start their march toward the city. “They were attacking me. But I wasn’t afraid. It wasn’t a nightmare.”

“A memory, I guess,” Castiel says with a shrug, entirely unimpressed. “Or something based on memories anyway.” He looks to at Dean when Dean doesn’t answer for a while. “You used to fight zombies,” he adds helpfully.

“Yeah, I gathered.”

Another sleep-related thought comes to Dean an hour later, when the outskirts of the city stubbornly refuse to get any closer. He has been dreaming a lot lately, but it has all just been dreams. No archangel ever bothered to visit them since he met the devil in Atlanta.

He mentions it to Cas and Cas only shrugs again. “Maybe Michael doesn’t have anything to say to you at the moment.”

“You don’t think maybe he can’t find me?”

“I honestly hope he can’t. But he doesn’t need to know where you physically are to get in contact. I suppose his silence has reasons. But those reasons don’t necessarily need to have anything to do with us.”

Dean thinks he understands – Michael has a war to lead, after all, and even if he’s been denied his final battle so far, there are still demons to fight, traitors to find, and maybe he’s discovered a city somewhere that hasn’t been levelled yet…

…well, that is unlikely, at least.

This city is done for, in any case. The reach the first ruins around midday – just piles of rubble, half-buried in sand. A lone bird fleeing from a ruin as they pass is the only sign of life they see all day.

Night comes upon them before they make it through the outer layer. At least this place offers more opportunities for hiding, though as he sits in the abandoned leftovers of a house with only Cas’ even breathing for company, Dean has well justified concerns about that shelter collapsing on top of them.

He wonders what Michael would say if his perfect vessel was smashed by the ruins of a city that wouldn’t be in ruins if Michael hadn’t destroyed it in the first place. And along with Dean the only guy who could tell them where the soul of Lucifer’s vessel is. It would probably be quite inconvenient.

Dean would have taken comfort in the thought had the house actually collapsed on them. Though he thinks the Keeper of Lucifer’s Vessel might not have appreciated it as much.

Just thinking of Cas that way makes Dean’s heart rate pick up speed. Which is pretty ridiculous, but he can help it as little as he can explain it. Cas is the only connection he has to his brother. And the thought of seeing his brother again fills Dean with as much anticipation as dread.

The more he thinks about it, the more he fears meeting the guy. And yet he finds himself yearning for that moment with everything he is.

They don’t get buried that night. Dean lets Cas sleep through it, wakes him in the first light of morning and hardly has the patience to wait through breakfast. Ever since they left the cave, he’s been restless, and it only seems to be getting worse. He wants to get wherever they are going and start working on kicking Lucifer in the ass.

Cas doesn’t seem to be suffering from the same kind of impatience, but then he’s had a lot of opportunity to hone his patience. Dean joins him for the morning meal, mostly because he’d feel silly pacing up and down like a child while the ex-angel eats his dried meat and berries. Besides, he knows he’ll regret it if he doesn’t eat anything, even if he isn’t hungry right now, but he does it without appetite or enthusiasm.

On top of his impatience, their travelling food already starts to get on his nerves. Chewing unhappily on a piece of half-dried fruit, Dean finds himself longing for something hot and greasy.

Due to his impatience, Dean actually ends up walking a few feet ahead of Cas down the dusty road instead of following behind him as usual. It’s not very practical considering Dean has no idea where they are going, but as long as there’s only one road to take, he feels pretty confident in his ability to pick the right one.

Eventually, though, he has to wait for Cas to catch up and show him the way. Unfortunately, Cas doesn’t seem to know it either.

“We have to go East,” he says, a little helplessly. “I think.”

Dean looks up at the sky, which as always presents itself as a uniform shroud of clouds. The sun doesn’t even offer a hint of its position. “Helpful.”

Instead of answering, Cas picks a street that is relatively clear and maybe even leads East. After a few minutes, they come across a building that has inconveniently collapsed all over the street, blocking it.

“I thought you knew where we’re going,” Dean hisses impatiently as they walk back the way they came until they find another path going in their general direction.

“I know where we want to end up,” Castiel corrects him. “Not how to get there.”

“Wow. Anybody tell you lately that you’re useless?”

“No. As I said, you haven’t been around for a while.” Castiel scowls at him.

“You’d think you have had enough time to memorize a few ways.”

Cas only rolls his eyes. “There are very many cities around, Dean,” he says. “Do you honestly believe I know every road to take in each of them? Not to mention that their paths are not exactly stable.”

Dean takes a deep breath. It tastes of dust and nearly makes his cough. “You have been here before, right? I mean, we are going somewhere in particular, aren’t we?”

“We are. And I have been here before. It was more than one hundred and eighty years ago, with Sam.”

“Ah,” Dean says. “Okay.” He finds a promising opening between two buildings and aims for it. It’s not a street, but some incredible force cleared a way straight through a block, and Dean isn’t picky. “What were you doing here? Also looking for a way to kill the devil?”

“No, at that time we were looking for a way to get Michael out of your body, preferably without destroying your mind.” Castiel eyes the walls around them as if expecting them to attack any moment. The way they look, they might, too. “We didn’t find one.”

“Really? That comes as a shock.”

“There is a very large settlement nearby. The largest I know. It developed from a camp of hunters that survived the initial battles. They are now in the possession of the largest still existing collection of books on angels, demons and other supernatural creatures,” Cas explains, for once without Dean having to ask first. “We contributed some of our own, from the library of an old friend.”

“You think they have the information we need?”

“No,” Cas answers openly. “But it’s a place to start.”

Well, that sounded promising. “So, how do we get there if you don’t remember the way? This city seems to be pretty large.”

“We’ll find it,” Cas promises, for whatever that’s worth. And then he adds, “If it still exists.”

It just keeps getting better.

 

-

 

Once they were so deep into the city that they were completely surrounded by buildings wherever they looked, Dean hoped they would make it to their destination within a matter of hours. Well, he hoped for minutes actually, but even Dean could tell that that was unlikely.

Of course, at that point he also thought that Castiel knew where they were going. At this point, he’s going to be happy if they make it anywhere within the week.

That he had to lower his expectation, however, doesn’t mean that he’s any less impatient. And that he has no hope of getting satisfied soon only means that he’s in a very bad mood.

Doesn’t help that Cas isn’t exactly fuelling his hope of gaining any useful knowledge at their destination.

A part of him still hopes Cas was kidding when he said that.

All the detours they have to take on the way through the city remind Dean unpleasantly of their way through the dead town in the valley. It’s hard to believe that was not even two weeks ago.

At least they don’t have to hurry to get out of _this_ city before nightfall. Which is good, because another night passes while they are looking for the right way. Dean is tired, but too agitated to sleep. Cas doesn’t speak much to him, because Dean keeps snapping at him at any opportunity. And rightfully so. Dean is pretty certain he’s seen that particular pile of rubble for the fourth time now.

At least there don’t seem to be any demons around. Cas hasn’t given out alarm signals once since they left the cave, and when Dean asks him about it, he points out that the world is big, and there are only so many demons topside to be annoying. The chances of accidentally walking into one far from the usual routes are small.

“But if the biggest settlement on the continent is around here somewhere, I’d have thought there’d be a lot of demons in this area,” Dean argues.

“And do what? Get killed? Like I said, it started as a hunter community. A lot of other people moved to the camp, seeking protection. Even now, there are more hunters in that place than anywhere else. The settlement doesn’t have anything so important the demons would risk getting near there to get it.”

“And they’re not going to come looking for us here?”

“Why would they do that? They don’t know what we are planning.”

“Yeah, but… killing the devil, that’s not so original a plan during the apocalypse that it would be a stretch for them to figure it out.”

Cas doesn’t answer, which Dean interprets as him not having considered this so far. Which is kind of hard to believe.

“I’d be more worried about the angels,” Cas eventually says. “The place is warded against them too, but we have to get there first. However…”

“However?”

“I don’t think they are going to come for us.”

“Because they want us to lead them to my brother’s soul?”

Cas nods. “But if they lost us, they might find us again while we’re here, and we’d be back under their observation.” He stops, looks around, and eventually picks a road so full of rubble it’s nearly impassable. “We should try to get into the rings of wards as quickly as possible.”

“Fantastic.” Dean rolls his eye. “Would be great if you could remember the way, then.”

 

-

 

Contrary to Dean’s fears, they don’t have to sleep another night in the ruins far from the community. Just as darkness falls, Cas sees the first row of Enochian symbols, and after that it gets a lot easier. As before, the symbols remain invisible to Dean’s eyes, and a part of him suspect that they aren’t even there and everyone is secretly making fun of him.

Which brings another memory back. “Is it only angels who can see Enochian symbols?” he asks.

Castile’s answer comes after a couple of seconds. “No,” he says, sounding distracted. “A lot of non-human entities can see them. Demons, to name one example.”

So much for that. As of now, Dean knows as much about Jena, the psycho-chick from hell, as he did before. She’s not human. Duh.

For a long time they walk in silence. Cas keeps looking left and right as if searching for something, obviously orienting himself on the invisibly marks.

“Shouldn’t we wait for someone to come and let us in?” Dean wants to know when his companion shows no sign of slowing down even hours after crossing the first wards.

“We don’t need to.”

“Last time we did.”

“That was courtesy.”

Dean stops short then, not believing what he heard. But Cas just keeps on walking as if he didn’t even notice, and so Dean has no choice but to run after him. “You’re kidding, right?”

“I can cross most wards. I told you that. Some are difficult, but I’ve fallen too far to be stopped by almost all protections against angels anymore.” Deans wonders if he detects a hint of regret in Castiel’s voice. He isn’t sure. He’s not sure if there is anything at all. “Back in the day it used to be harder, but I discovered it’s barely a problem now. It seems I _was_ able to fall further, after all.”

At the end he sounds almost amused. Or maybe it’s something else entirely. Reading Cas is hard, maybe because no matter what he says, he isn’t, and never will be, human.

“So, when we went to that other camp…”

“I didn’t know how they would react if we just showed up. So I decided to introduce myself properly. You and Sam always told me you would appreciate me knocking on the door more often.”

Dean has no idea what he’s talking about. “But the wards. Last time you were disturbing them, causing the others to come. Don’t you think the people here might be a little pissed once they realise an angel is walking straight into their camp? And they might not be of the ‘Ask first, shoot later’ kind.”

“The symbols won’t notice,” Cas tells him, still sounding distant and distracted. “I’m not telling them.”

“Wait a minute” Dean isn’t sure he got this right. “You’re telling me you only let their alarms ring last time because you wanted them to know we were coming?”

“I was knocking.”

Dean remembers a long time of standing around on aching feet, waiting for the descendants of Cas’ old comrades to show up. He’s not sure he’s amused.

But he supposes the people wouldn’t have reacted too well to two strangers just walking into their camp. They were quite suspicious, and hardy any of them remembered what Cas looks like. Which might have made it the right decision then, but that also means they might be making a mistake now. Because he can’t imagine the people they are going to meet now to react much better, even if they don’t realise that Cas Used To Be An Angel. This whole world isn’t a good host.

But Cas doesn’t worry about it. When Dean asks, he is informed that the community they are aiming for is used to visitors from elsewhere. Trade still happens, here.

“They have farming, but the last time we were here, it wasn’t enough to sustain so many people. They trade with other settlements.”

“Then how come we haven’t seen anyone for ages?” Dean is overcome with the image of finding absolutely nothing, or worse, a graveyard. It’s been so long since Cas was here. Anything could have happened.

“Because we are using a back route.” Since they couldn’t find the main route, obviously. “And you have to consider that many visitors in these days mean five a week or ten a month.” Cas stops suddenly, a frown falling over his face before he walks on. “I would have expected to run into a patrol by now, though. They used to control the area all the time, not merely relying on the wards.”

“Maybe we’re still too far away?” Dean offers without much hope.

“Maybe,” Cas agrees. But he doesn’t sound too hopeful either.

 

-

 

They needn’t have worried. They find the settlement some time after nightfall and it’s all there, unharmed and teeming with people. There are more people around here than in any other place Dean has seen so far. They don’t need long to reach a marketplace where people check out goods, or stand talking, laughing, sometimes yelling at each other. For a moment Dean closes his eyes and travels two hundred years into the past, to busy streets and a world that was alive.

The illusion doesn’t last. There are still far less people than in any market in New York even on a bad day. The light is provided by torches and gas lamps and the smell is all wrong. It smells of herbs and food he isn’t familiar with and the underlying stench of excrement is stronger than in the other communities, where Dean hardly noticed it at all.

The air seems warmer here.

As Cas predicted, no one pays them much attention at all. They are just two humans among a lot of other humans, and Dean hasn’t until now realised how much he missed being anonym in the mass in a way he doesn’t even remember.

Only when someone notices their unfamiliar faces they stare, and nudge their friends to bring attention to the new ones. But no one draws guns on them, which is a very nice change.

Dean wonders if there is something like an inn here. The visitors coming for trading have to stay somewhere, right? He looks at the buildings round him: rebuilt from ruins or constructed new using rubble, but definitely house-shaped, some with two storeys or more, some with thin lines of smoke coming out of chimneys. All the houses have doors, boards before the windows. In some open windows he sees curtains. Inside, the rooms are well lit.

This is the first place that truly feels like a town to him.

His stomach growls and he finds himself hungrily eying the stands that line the street in search for something tasty that hasn’t been dried or canned for the last two centuries. Then he remembers that they have nothing to trade. Which makes his wonderings about an inn pointless.

He’s been looking forward to sleeping in a bed again. In the other communities, they have been given food and lodging simply on the ground of them being human (or Cas). Somehow, Dean doesn’t think it’ll be as easy in this case.

Then again, tired and sore as he is, he still doesn’t feel like sleeping. They came here for a reason, and he’s eager to finally find out if the trip was in the least worth it.

“You think the library is still open?” Dean asks Cas. Instead of replying, Cas picks up speed as he wanders down the street, finding his path between people who show a remarkable talent for being in the way.

The streets get darker and emptier the further they get from the market, but they never clear completely, and in the end the walk doesn’t take all that long. This is, after all, not a city but a makeshift town with no more than a thousand inhabitants.

They end up in front of large wooden doors that are lined by torches left and right and inconveniently closed. There are two men standing before them, talking, one of them smoking a cigarette. Both of them are armed with machetes, and probably guns, too.

Castiel walks up to and stops right between them, making it impossible for them to ignore him. “We wish to enter the library,” he tells them without preamble. “Is that possible at this hour?”

Both guards stare at him with blank faces. “You… what?” one of them asks. “Are you fucking kidding me?”

“At what hours is entry to the library possible? Time is of the essence.” Cas, who’s speech patterns have deteriorated to something slightly inhuman to Dean’s ears frowns at them. “This building still functions as a library, does it not?”

The guys are still staring. “It’s a library,” one of them finally says.

“We wish to enter it,” Cas tells them again.

“It’s not open to just anyone.” This time it’s the other one speaking. He doesn’t say it with the smug smirk Dean’s pretty sure he’s seen on thousand of greedy faces but like it’s something completely obvious and the two of them are idiots for even asking about it.

Still, the question comes over his lips automatically. “How much?”

“Let’s see your permit first,” the man says.

Dean looks at Castiel, who looks at the two guards. “What permit?” the angel asks.

 

-

 

As it turns out, there’s more than one permit they need if they want to get anywhere in this place. In order to enter the library, they need papers, and those papers have to be bought at – Dean nearly gulps when he hears it – the hunters’ guild.

He feels like he got knocked into the world of a fantasy movie.

Unfortunately, the guild doesn’t sell permits for anything after nightfall. Apparently, two hundred years and an apocalypse later, nothing has changed about sucky business hours.

Things are actually even more inconvenient than that, as Dean and Cas learn when they are informed that each of them needs a permit to even be inside the settlement. The two guards in front of the library get quite exited when they realise their visitors don’t have any – perhaps because they can’t believe anyone doesn’t know about that, or maybe just because they finally have an excuse to do something with those weapons of theirs.

Since Dean and Cas smartly don’t put up a fight, only one of the guards gets to use his gun, and that only to threaten them with it while he escorts them to the guild house. Apparently it is open after nightfall after all, when it’s about giving someone a hard time.

Things are tense for a little while, but from the beginning it seems clear to everyone that Dean and Cas didn’t try to rob them of their fee but honestly didn’t know about it.

“Our camp is pretty far off the main roads,” Dean tells them. “No one has made it here in ages.”

The hunters accept it with grunts that could be translated as “Whatever.”

While Dean negotiates the price of their permit, Cas gives their names and origin to another guy who writes the information down on two dirty-looking sheets of brownish paper. They are now Dean Smith and Cas Jones from Lawrence, Kansas, apparently. That’s pretty far away for their light luggage and the fact that they came on foot, but despite Dean’s worry, no one notices the obvious lie. It takes a while before Dean realises that probably neither of them even knows where Kansas _is_.

Or used to be.

The names are a different matter. He can see why Cas doesn’t go with his real name – they don’t know him here, after all, and ‘Castiel’ sounds a little bit too much like ‘Angel’. Dean himself, on the other hand… He knows his last name is Winchester. One of the angels who abducted him in Georgia said so, and it felt so natural that he needed a few days before he realised the information was new. That Cas now thinks it necessary to keep his identity secret could be in order to mislead anyone who might come looking for them. Or it’s because his name is known and would cause them problems. He _was_ Michael’s vessel, after all, and he _did_ destroy the world.

Right. Not thinking about that.

Unfortunately, these hunters _are_ insufferably smug pains in the ass after all. They demand pretty much all of their leftover food and all but two of the skins and furs as payment. Dean’s pretty sure they would have demanded more if the two of them only possessed more. And no, it’s not up for negotiation.

It leaves them with pretty much nothing to pay for the library permit, but without the entry permit they won’t get the library permit and so Dean can do nothing but wander up and down the street cursing quietly to himself during the long and cold night they have to spend outside – because in order to get a room at the inn – not that they could pay for it – the entry permit has to be shown, and they won’t get theirs until morning.

“But it’s already done,” Dean has protested as they were being shoved out of the door. “I just saw you fill it!”

“It needs a stamp, and the guy in charge of stamping is sleeping,” he was informed. “Now get out, before we decide to just kick you out of our city!”

“City, my ass,” Dean mutters as he kicks another pebble down the cobbled street. While before it was warmer than the chill he’s grown used to, it seems colder than usual now. That might be because he’s tired and has no place to sleep, though – and he’s hungry because, of course: no purchase of anything, including food, without the main permit.

Damn fucking piece of shit town.

Naturally, the hunters already kept everything they want as payment, and if they feel like it they can make true of their threat and kick them out again with nothing for their trouble. Dean’s so pissed he can hardly talk. Hunters aren’t supposed to be like this.

Or are they?

It’s for the protection the hunters offer. People are safe here, and in return, the members of the hunters’ guild can ask anything they want of them, at any time. There is no law protecting the people. Who doesn’t give the hunters what they want gets kicked out with barely the clothes they are wearing. Or killed outright, as a warning.

That’s what’s become clear after talking to a couple of people on the street. “It’s still better than anywhere else,” one of them added, making Dean want to punch him.

“I find it hard to ignore the irony of these hunters not even doing a very good job of protecting anyone,” Castiel says suddenly, right beside Dean, making him jump both in surprise and because of the telepathy. “At this point, I believe the reputation of this place is protecting the people more than anything else.”

“Damn it, Cas!” Dean curses, because he’s already in a cursing mood and just had the shit startled out of him. “When did you forget how to use normal sentences? Five words, no more. I’m tired.”

“I have food,” Cas tells him and hands him a thick slice of bread. This is the more pleasant kind of surprise.

“Where did you get that? Sold your pants for it?”

“I’m still wearing my pants. As you can see.” Cas’ voice is a little muffled because he’s chewing on his own slice. “Saw where one of the street traders kept his supplies. Stole it.”

“Huh.” Dean takes the bread and takes a bite. “Knew there was a reason why I kept you around.”

While he doesn’t know how bread is supposed to taste, he’s sure it’s not like this. Still, it’s edible, and he’ll be able to get used to it if he has no other choice. Also, right now he’s hungry enough to find everything tasty.

“You said these hunters aren’t doing their job right,” Dean says after a few minutes only filled with the sound of their chewing. The bread’s pretty hard already. “What do you mean? The wards not right?”

“There’s nothing wrong with the wards. They are correct and seem to be checked and renewed regularly. But it appears the protectors of this place seem to rely mostly on them. The creeks we crossed on the way here are artificial and the water inside doubtlessly blessed, but not only did we come across no patrolling hunters outside the town, I don’t think they even _do_ patrol outside. They place their faith in ancient magic and the strength of their numbers.”

Dean can see the problem in that. It doesn’t make him think any kinder of the guys running this place. “You don’t think that’ll protect them in the long run, huh?”

“Of course not. They can hold off simple demons and angels, but not humans. There are enough collaborating with their enemies, and those could come and break the wards. And even without them… a powerful demon can break a devil’s trap. Many powerful demons can break a ring of wards. This place doesn’t have much to offer for the demons that they couldn’t get elsewhere for less trouble, otherwise it would have been long gone.” Cas sits down on the street, his back against the wall of a house, and sighs. It sounds deceptively human. “Eventually, the demons will take this place. As soon as they realise it’s possible they’ll come here.”

“But why, if there’s nothing they want?” The questions is silly, Dean knows. Demons are evil by nature.

“There are many people here,” Castiel replies, as if that would be an explanation. And it is. “Numbers do not offer protection in this case. These people should know better than to attract attention by gathering in such great numbers, but I guess it’s part of your nature to seek company. I’m not saying the hunters assembled here are useless, but they would never be enough to protect everyone if taken by surprise.”

“And the demons would be drawn in by all the innocent, harmless people they can kill here. Or possess,” Dean finishes the thought. “I get it.” He snorts. “Guess the ‘hunters’ here wouldn’t even try to save everyone. They let them pay for their “protection”, but once an army of black-eyed bitches knocks on their door they’ll make sure to save themselves and fuck off.”

“Such is the nature of humanity.”

What a time to become philosophical. And what a time to become defensive. “Bullshit. It’s the nature of dickjerks.”

“From what I have seen, humans in general are first and foremost interested into saving themselves,” Castiel insists calmly. “It’s simply in their nature to be selfish.”

“Yeah?” Dean doesn’t know why Cas’ words piss him off. It’s not even that he disagrees. “And what about my brother, then? Did he run away to save his own ass?”

“No,” Cas admits, not sounding at all as if this changes his opinion. “But Sam was special.”

“I guess he was,” Dean mutters. He’s picking the leftovers of his bread apart rather than eating them until he feels Cas’ eyes on him.

“You’re special, too,” the angel assures Dean, as if he felt the need to comfort him.

“Well.” Dean’s not sure what to say to that. He stuffs the last bite in his mouth and chews slowly. “I miss burgers,” he tells his companion.

To his surprise, Cas nods slowly. “So do I.”

 

-

 

The night brings little sleep and the morning another unpleasant surprise, though this one without unpleasant consequences; it merely creeps Dean out, even though he should be used to shit like that by now.

His brain must still be stuck back in the unremembered past, because so far he simply accepted that the people here use paper. It seems a pretty normal thing to do. Only after they get finally handed their permits and he touches them for the first time does he realise that without trees in the immediate vicinity or any industry to speak off, paper should have become pretty rare by now.

“Please tell me it’s at least not _human_ skin,” he groans as they leave the guild house. The permit lies in his hands with a heaviness that makes him uncomfortable and he hurries to put it away.

“It’s not human skin,” Cas tells him, but if that’s the truth or merely Cas doing as he was told remains a mystery Dean doesn’t want to explore.

The demands of the guild left them with precious few possessions. All they still have are the weapons they kept hidden under their coats – would have been a damn shame to lose Cas’ angel killing sword! – and Castiel’s bow, which made the hunters laugh at them. Their loss – Dean has seen what Cas can do with the thing.

Fact is, they came all the way here, paid a lot of… stuff in order to even be allowed to _be_ here, all so they can enter the library, and now they can’t enter the library because they can’t pay for it. Because giving away the few weapons they still have or Dean’s leather jacket is out of the question.

Dean thinks about breaking in, or failing that burning the building down, just out of spite. Cas comes up with a better idea: theft.

They spend the day near the library, watching who goes in and who comes out. It’s obviously not the most popular place in town, but in the end it offers about half a dozen people to choose from, and that’s still more than Dean expected – Cas told him that this place has a school, but most of the people who came here from elsewhere can’t read.

Dean already suspected that being a hunter in the old days meant mastering some of the less legal finer arts, and he finds confirmation when he just happens to bump into an older man on the crowded marketplace and just happens to snatch the permit from his pocket with surprising ease.

Castiel fares no worse. When they reunite, he has his own permit for the library, along with a small box full of strong-smelling spices. Apparently he’s learned a thing or two in the time they were separated.

…though how Dean knows Cas couldn’t do that when he knew him back in the day he wouldn’t be able to tell if anyone asked him.

“These are from the north,” Castiel explains as he shows Dean the spices in a hidden corner between buildings. “They have come a long way and are quite valuable.”

“So we could theoretically use them to buy permits of our own?” Dean asks, really hoping that isn’t what his friend has in mind.”

But Cas seems to think the same way Dean does: “We could,” he confirms. “But we can also change the names and dates on the ones we’ve stolen and use these to buy food and blankets.”

“In that case, we should do it now,” Dean points out. “If people haven’t changed completely since my times, us new arrivals will be the ones those guys are going to suspect as soon as they realise they’ve been robbed. By then I’d rather be elsewhere.”

“Their suspicions would be correct,” Cas reminds him. Dean nods grimly. It’s not like it’s their fault they have to resort to these methods.

“One more reason to hurry.”

 

-

 

The library is one of the old buildings, something that survived the destruction more or less intact and was repaired rather than rebuilt. It’s easy to distinguish the old from the new. Buildings that were erected from the rubble have smaller doors, just a few small windows and the ceilings are lower. Inside the library, the ceilings are high and the rooms large. Bookshelves separate the main room into several small compartments. The layout of the building lets Dean assume that it has always been a library, even before.

It probably had more books, once. Now almost half of the shelves are empty, though if the books were destroyed in the initial disaster or burned during a hard winter or whatever, Dean can only speculate.

Most of the books are, as expected, very old. Some are even mouldy. The air is dry, but just as cold as outside. Oil lamps on the walls and the sides of the shelves don’t do much to chase away the deep shadows that fill the room.

In case of this library, Dean can see why closing the place after nightfall makes sense: without the weak light falling through the high windows, it would be hard to even look for a particular book, let alone read it.

Which brings him back to the problem of what exactly they are even looking for. Fortunately, the books are sorted by category, which is one of the three things that excite Dean about this place. The other two are the fact that besides the guards at the entrance, there is no one here but the visitors, who at the present time include exactly himself and Cas, and the way the bookshelves hide many corners of the room form view.

Castiel seems to have as little orientation as Dean when it comes to actually finding anything. “It looked different last time,” is all he has to say in defence of him once again having no idea where to go. In this case, at least, Dean can help. He strides through the rows of books, hoping to find anything on angels in general, Lucifer in particular or perhaps even a book titled “How to End an Apocalypse – Beginner’s Guide”.

What he finds, to his surprise, is a small section of fictional literature. Tolkien stands beside Stephen King and Diana Gabaldon. There’s not much, only two or three shelves, but somehow, Dean had thought that everything that’s left would be practical reading.

 Most is. Agriculture, farming, constructing. A few cook books as well. Dean looks into one of them and finds a lot of hand written notes on how to replace ingredients that will never be available again with others that may or may not be similar in taste.

It hits him then that he will never again eat French fries in his life. The thought is so depressing that he puts the book back and resumes his concentrating on what they came for.

“If we can’t kill Lucifer, then how about Michael?” he asks, taking out a book that looks old and therefore promising. It is, as it turns out, written in Latin and Dean puts it back with an annoyed grimace. “If he’s gone, will Lucifer pack up and leave?”

“Michael is more powerful than Lucifer,” is all Castiel says. It’s not exactly an answer to Dean’s question, but if there’s no hope at all of killing that one guy, there’s no point in speculating what the other would do in his absence.

Dean picks another book, a thin, leather bound volume without title or author. It looks like someone’s journal. When Dean flips through the pages, he catches words like ‘angels’ and ‘Lucifer’. “Looks good,” he comments.

Cas looks at the book through eyes cast in shadow. “Keep it,” he says. “Keep everything that looks promising. We won’t have time reading it here.”

Dean just nods and grabs the Latin book as well, figuring Cas’ll be able to make sense of it.

He probably should feel bad for stealing books these people might desperately need someday. Maybe not for killing the devil, but there’s certainly a lot of knowledge in there that might come in handy in a world dominated by supernatural bullshit. He isn’t really sorry, though – partially because they need these to end the apocalypse, which everyone will profit from, but mostly because the hunters in this town thoroughly piss him off.

Though the fact that they took nearly everything from Dean and Cas comes in handy now. It leaves more room for the storing of books. Especially since their spices turned out to be mostly worthless, since even for the purchase of food within the town, special permits are needed. And everyone is too scared of the hunters and their law-enforcement to trade under the hand.

They kept the spices anyway. They might be useful somewhere else.

If not, they can still use them on their food. If they ever again find some, that is.

In the end, they take quite a lot of books. Dean collects more than Cas does, because he takes everything that seems to mention angels even once while Castiel is more picky. He’s probably read most of these before and knows which ones are promising.

There is the problem of how to get out with their packs full of books when they were so obviously empty when they entered. The solution is almost idiotically easy: They glance through a gab in the door and watch the street as well as the two guards that are also watching the street. When the street is empty, they slip out, position themselves behind the guards and knock them out with expert hits to the backs of their necks.

Castiel doesn’t need to show Dean the moves. His body remembered on its own.

After that, their time is limited They have to be gone before their victims wake up or are discovered, so they leave the town and quickly get off the streets in favour of striding through half-destroyed back alleys and through spaces that once might have been someone’s living rooms.

If someone follows them – and Dean doesn’t for one moment dare to hope no one bothers – they never come close enough for the two book-thieves to hear them.

The hunters of that place don’t like to leave the safety of their wards and reputation. They will not follow them out into territory where the risk of running into demons is higher, Cas says. Dean guesses he has a point there, but he isn’t too keen on going back into demon territory himself.

They find an alternative by hurrying to put distance between them and the settlement but staying within in the city. Just like on the way in, they get lost constantly, but this time it’s not as bad, since they are not aiming for any specific goal as long as they keep going in one direction.

Dean keeps wondering what city they are in. He looks for landmarks that will help him, but finds nothing. If anything, the destruction here seems to be worse than in Atlanta or wherever else he’s been before. Eventually they come to a place Dean at first believes to have once been a park.  But it wasn’t. It’s just a large, empty space where the blast of Michael’s power levelled the buildings completely.

They avoid the wide open space, turn a little more to the east and walk on until dark. At night they once again sleep inside the ruin of a building, huddled together for warmth. Dean is hungry, has been for hours, and even though his companion never complains, he can hear Castiel’s stomach rumble as well.

They are entirely out of food. It occurs to Dean that they might not have to worry about killing Satan because they are going to starve before they can try. Considering they lost their food in order to get some information on devil-killing, that would be kind of ironic.

The fact remains that they need new food. And unless they come across a more accommodating town sometime soon or run into one of Castiel’s old shelters, they need to leave the city and hope to find some animals to eat. Inside the ruins, the animals have too many places to hide in. Dean rarely sees one even from the distance, though he hears their scuffling constantly. The city belongs to them now.

The books they carry are heavier than the food has been and offer no replacement for the energy they lose carrying them around. Altogether the first day after escaping from the library is impressively miserable, and the only change the second day brings is that Dean is even hungrier than he was before.

At least they find a river that still keeps some of its water, and as they follow it, it leads them out of the city, to where more plants grow and more animals roam.

Dean had thought they would start going through the books as soon as they got a safe distance between them and any egocentric hunters who might want to make them the subjects of a public execution, but food is the more pressing issue at the moment. The books will have to wait until they caught something to eat, which is inconvenient because the books are heavy and uncomfortable on his back, and as soon as he is able to look at them closely enough to judge them useless, he’ll leave them behind here to rot.

It doesn’t look like he’ll have an opportunity to read anytime soon. Dean takes a hungry break in one of the last ruins still intact enough to keep him from being seen while Cas goes out to see if he can shoot something with his bow, and knows they won’t linger here longer than they have to. The area is too open.

Cas is gone for hours. Dean sits around in the meantime, flipping through the books he stole. There are a lot of things that are interesting, but nothing that is useful, at least on first sight, and half of it he can’t even read. In the end he takes a thick volume with pictures and reads the description beside every picture showing a creature with wings. It helps kill the time, if nothing else.

What also helps kill the time are his nerves. A soft wind is blowing, for almost the first time since Dean got dumped by his archangel. It makes the dust drift by in shapes resembling bodies out of the corner of his eye and keeps him alert and very distracted from his literature. When Castiel returns around midday, Dean nearly shoots him.

When his companion left, Dean had offered to go looking for some destroyed supermarkets or convenience stores in the city. They’d passed through an area that looked like a shopping district, and maybe there’s some storage that still offers something edible in cans to be found. Like the storage he met Jena in. Dean was able to not instantly die or get taken those first days as well, but Cas seems convinced that he lost that ability when the angel found him and strongly suggests Dean doesn’t move at all while he’s gone.

The cans Dean never got to look for would have been an advantage in terms of durability and transport, but they are not necessary for their survival, in the end. Cas, it turns out, managed to catch two rabbits and also brings a handful of tiny, crippled looking apples and even a few potatoes.

The latter will have to wait until they have something to cook them in, because Dean sure as hell isn’t going to eat them raw.

The same goes for the rabbits. Dean would really prefer them roasted, and with the wind having the dust drift around them like a veil shielding them from sight, even Cas agrees that it’s probably almost safe to make a fire.

Safe enough, anyway.

They light it in a roofless house, using dry twigs and drier grass. There’s not much burnable material around, so it doesn’t burn long, but they manage to get one of the rabbits into an edible state. It’s skinny and small, but it helps against the worst of the hunger pains.

By the time they’re done, it’s almost dark. Dean wants to keep moving anyway, so they can make it to the smaller town that during daytime has already been visible in the not so far distance. The dust and the dark would make it harder for any pursuers to find them as they crossed the flat plain, but Cas insists they stay. Something about the way he looks over to where the town is hidden by the growing darkness makes Dean think about the forest that separates this dead land and the living one they left behind days ago, or the valley with the town Castiel let die.

He doesn’t question the decision to wait.

 

-

 

There’s little sleep that night. Dean nods off long after dark, but wakes up after what feels like minutes. For once he doesn’t dream, and Michael remains silent.

Castiel never even tries to sleep. He doesn’t react to Dean’s careful attempts to start a conversation, and Dean doesn’t pester him. Something is bothering his friend. He can understand. A lot of things are bothering Dean.

With sleep fleeing him and Castiel not talking, there is nothing to distract Dean from his thoughts. The night is very long.

Probably for both of them.

In the morning they eat the small apples and leave with the first light. Castiel is still quiet, but he answers when Dean asks where they are going.

“We need a place to stay for a day or two so we can see through the books. The next small town will offer one.”

“You’ve been there before?”

“Once. It’s far enough from the settlement in Tallahassee to be safe from any human pursuers.”

“Tallahassee? Oh.” So they are in Florida. Somehow, Dean got the direction they were walking in completely wrong. It’s slightly unsettling, but no match for Castiel’s words. “What about demons?”

“Those loyal to Lucifer won’t attack us. The others… won’t go there. And no one will expect us to be there. We should be safe for a while.”

Lucifer wants Dean and Cas to lead him to his vessel’s soul, which they can’t if they are dead, so none of _his_ demons would kill them. That much is clear. “Why won’t the others go there?”

“Lucifer left his mark on the place,” is all Castiel offers as an explanation. It’s enough to make Dean expect to find a place as dead as the forest and the valley. Except that Cas wouldn’t have let them stay there for a day, let alone a few days.

And when they finally reach the town, hours later when they sun is already sinking and Dean’s stomach is growling loudly in the silence surrounding them, there is nothing special about it. The destruction is slightly less complete here than in the city, probably because the place was only at the edge of the blast that took out Tallahassee, but in the end it’s still just another ruined town among thousands. Nothing about the place feels off, or threatening.

But Castiel hasn’t spoken in hours and his face is grim and pale.

He stops a few times, contemplating the way, but this time Dean is very certain his angelic friend knows exactly where he is going.

The place he eventually stops at, in the last orange light of the day, is a normal street that looks like all the others. Small houses in small gardens line it. Some have collapsed, some show hardly any damage at all.

In one of the gardens that face the street three large wooden crosses are standing, their outlines a stark shadow against the dirty red sky. Their size is enough to tell Dean that these were used to crucify people. He swallows.

Castiel points toward the house on the opposite side of the street. Mostly intact, with large, glassless windows facing the empty crosses – a prime seat for the show. “I lost your bother, once,” he says. “This is where I found him.”

Dean looks at the crosses and swallows again, feeling sick. But Castiel walks over to the house with slow steps, and when Dean follows he can see inside through the glassless window and finds it empty, the sparse furniture bar any personal belongings and covered in dirt.

There’s not much in the large room. A long cabinet with drawers, a table without chairs. A bed with a metal frame, and off the frame something is hanging down that Dean can’t make out clearly in the meagre light. Maybe chains.

“Lucifer had three people crucified on those crosses.” Castiel’s voice is low, somewhat rough. “Every day. The crosses were never empty. Sometimes his victims lasted for days. He had his demons torture them, or did it himself. Lucifer has a great potential for cruelty.”

“And he made your friend watch,” Dean guesses. “Telling him they’d stop if he let Satan in.”

Castiel nods. “They would cut off those humans’ ears and noses. Pull out their teeth and fingernails. Or they set their hair and clothes on fire. Smashed their kneecaps and cut them open so their entails hung out of their bodies. Children, too.”

“I get the idea.” Dean presses his lips together and refuses to use his imagination. He doesn’t want to hear this.

“Some were left alone,” Cas continues, as if he hadn’t heard him. “They were simply left hanging until their bodies failed to function any longer. Crows would eat their eyes.” Castiel does turn to look at the crosses. “The demons never cut out their tongues.”

Dean closes his eyes.

“Lucifer let all the victims know that their suffering would end if Sam gave in,” Castiel tells him.

Dean knows where this is going. “How long did this go on?” he asks, refusing to think of his little brother chained to that bed, forced to watch innocent (children) people be tortured to death while they (blamed him) pleaded with him, and knowing so very well how easy it would be to save them.

“Weeks,” Castiel answers the question. And after a moment he adds, “Lucifer never hurt Sam.”

He doesn’t say it like that made things any better, and Dean supposes it didn’t.

“And you got him out all by yourself?”

“Yes.”

“If that was so easy, then why is fighting the devil such a damn problem right now?” Dean hisses. He wants to leave this place; it makes him feel on edge, makes him want to scream. Lashing out at Cas without reason won’t get him anywhere, he knows, but Castiel is the only one around to be lashed out at.

“I never faced Lucifer when I freed Sam. And even so, there was nothing easy about it,” Cas lets him know, utterly failing to react to Dean’s aggressive tone. “I had to wait a long time for a chance, knowing Lucifer would have taken me out in a heartbeat. Eventually, it was Michael who offered an opportunity.”

“How so?”

“Some of his activities and those of his army could not be ignored even for the sake of breaking the vessel. Lucifer had to attend matters personally, leaving Sam with only his demon guards. I don’t believe Michael knew what was happening here, else he might have waited until Sam was broken.”

“You think he would have given in?” Dean shivers, or maybe he’s trembling. He doesn’t know why.

“Sam was only human,” Cas says gently. “Even he could only bear so much.”

“But you got him out in time.”

“Yes. It was difficult, though. There were many demons still around. I nearly did not make it.”

Dean looks into the room again, but the falling night has deepened the shadows and leaves him to sense, rather than see, the cabinet, the bed. He thinks about what Castiel told him once: that Lucifer never hurt his brother, but didn’t keep his demons from hurting him. He decides not to ask.

What he asks instead is, “How did you lose him in the first place?”

The fallen angel doesn’t reply right away, which is enough to tell Dean that he won’t like the answer – or that he wouldn’t like it if he remembered his brother and actually cared. He isn’t sure he does. This place, what happened here, it’s hitting him hard, but that’s just general pity and not at all connected to any personal feelings for one of the involved parties.

He kind of regrets having asked at all. He might not really be interested in the answer.

“Sam and I had taken out a group of powerful demons, but it drew Lucifer’s attention and Sam… was ill at that time. He overexerted himself, and was unable to get away afterwards. I had been injured in the fight. I couldn’t carry him.”

“And so you left him behind,” Dean finishes quietly. He closes his eyes for a moment and takes deep breath. Thinks about Cas saving his own ass and leaving Dean to Lucifer’s angels. “So you could get away yourself.”

“You must understand, Dean.” Castiel’s voice sounds pained. “I didn’t want to leave him. He asked me to.”

“How convenient!”

“Neither of us was a match for Lucifer, together not any more than on our own. If I had stayed, he would have killed me. I could not have helped Sam then. In that case, your brother would have broken. Knowing I had escaped, he knew he only had to hold on until I freed him.”

“Took you long enough to do that.” Sudden, inexplicable anger makes Dean grab the lapels of Castiel’s jacket and shove him against the wall beside the window. “You left him behind! I thought you were supposed to watch over him!” he snarls.  “Isn’t this the guy you wanted to protect at any cost? And then you ran away and left him to the fucking devil’s nonexistent mercy!”

“Dean.” Thin fingers wrap around Dean’s wrists and pull down his hands, and large blue eyes meet his unafraid, though full of pain. “I had no other choice. It would have destroyed him. He had nothing left but me. You understand? _Nothing_! And no one would ever have come to save him.”

Maybe there is not even an accusation in there. Cas seems desperate to make Dean understand, nothing else, but his words still hit like a fist to the face. They cause Dean to let him go and take a step back.

He doesn’t know what he’s feeling. He doesn’t know this guy they are discussing. He doesn’t feel anything for his brother when he thinks of him. The anger, the sadness and shame that nearly overwhelmed him came out of nowhere, and their lack of foundation makes Dean want to scream.

“Why did you even show me this?” he asks, surprised how rough his voice sounds. He has no control over his emotions, but when he tries to analyse them there’s nothing, and that paradox is making him sick. He wants to leave.

“I thought you should see it,” Cas answers. “I thought it would help you understand.”

“That this was all my fault? You made that clear enough from the start.”

But Castiel shakes his head. “I merely wanted to give you an idea of what Sam went through. What he endured. I feel I owe him that much – to make you understand how strong he was.” Castiel’s voice is little more than a whisper. “So maybe, if you ever again remember him, you will be proud.”

Dean takes another step back, takes a deep breath. “Hell, Cas,” he mutters.

“Also,” Castiel continues, his voice stronger now. “You need to know what happened so you will understand why I can’t allow anything like this to happen again. I failed to protect him far too often. I cannot fail now. All would be lost. And all would be in vain.”

Another deep breath, and Dean decides he’s had enough of feeling like acid is burning away something inside him. “Let’s just move on, okay? I really don’t feel like spending the night here.” He throws one last look into the room where his brother has spent far too many days at the devil’s mercy, suffering and hating himself. But night has fallen and inside, there’s only darkness.

Dean feels closer to his unknown brother now, somehow, as if for the first time he begins to understand that the man really exists. That he isn’t just stories and a dead body for Satan to show off. But at the same time, he doesn’t care about him. Why would he? He doesn’t know him.

Even if he wanted to, Dean wouldn’t be able to feel more for this man than for any other unknown victim of this war.

And while he dreads actually meeting the guy that makes him feel so out of balance it’s driving him crazy, he also finds himself convinced that once Lucifer is defeated and his brother back with them, everything will become clearer.

Perhaps he just needs to not be able to run anymore.

“Proud,” he mutters as they walk away, more to himself than his friend, moving the word on his tongue like something disgusting. “When he’s finally back here, I’m going to kick his ass for constantly making me feel like shit!”

Since he didn’t talk to Castiel anyway, he doesn’t mind that the angel is silent for a long time. Dean concentrates only on the next step and the next step, trying not to feel the looming crosses in his back like a threat that is going to jump at him. Trying not to run.

Eventually, Cas says, “Dean.”

“What is it?” Dean doesn’t want to talk. He doesn’t want to think. He just wants to leave here and find some place to sleep.

“Sam won’t come back.”

Dean stops.

“What do you mean? Why wouldn’t he? It’ll be okay after we killed Lucifer, right? When the devil’s gone, there’s no reason to keep him hidden any longer.”

“And no reason to bring him back,” Cas says softly. “I can’t revive him, Dean. It’s Lucifer himself who does it, or Michael. With Lucifer gone, the angels won’t have use for Sam anymore. If against all probability we succeed, you will never see your brother again.”


	7. Chapter 7

The sun is close to rising when they finally stop for a rest. Once again it’s a mostly intact house that gives them shelter for the night. This one has two storys and is stable enough for Dean and Castiel to take a room on the second floor, though Dean more than wishes they hadn’t. There’s still a carpet on the floor and mouldering wallpaper hangs off the walls. The frame of a bed stands in a corner, the skeleton of a computer under a desk and shelves have been nailed to the wall, containing books and other stuff, like candles and small figurines. Lovingly collected memorabilia.

Staying in empty ruins is easier.

The only window in the room is broken, but small. The soft wind doesn’t get inside at all and there’s no way to see them from the outside. It makes this place well protected by recent definition, but Dean has a hard time finding rest anyway. He takes over the first watch without a word while Cas curls up beside him, facing the wall. His breathing never turns to the deep, slow rhythm of sleep.

It’s silent here. Not only quiet, but utterly silent; the kind of silence that makes Cas’ breathing sound like a storm and Dean’s heartbeat like thunder. He imagines something lurking in the living room downstairs, creeping up the stairs without a sound, slowly getting closer and closer to the door of this room, hidden beneath the sound of Dean’s blood rushing through his veins. Over this thought, he nods off.

He wakes up in bright daylight – as bright as daylight gets anymore, anyway. His back and neck hurt and Cas is nowhere to be seen. Dean’s ass hurts as well, from having sat on the hard floor all night. With a soft groan he lets himself fall to the side and lie there for a while, allowing his stressed joints and muscles a moment of peace.

Castiel’s absence doesn’t bother him for a while, and when he becomes more aware and it does, he realises that there is a bunch of the small, sour tasting apples that have accompanied them through the last days on the desk, where the dust has been roughly brushed off. Cas probably went to gather more of those.

Eventually, Dean stretches and drags himself over to the desk to grab some apples for breakfast. He finds himself missing all the food they lost in order to steal books from the library. Canned pickles suddenly sound a lot more awesome than they ever did when he had to eat them.

While he eats, Dean’s eyes linger on the bookshelf. Part of it has collapsed, but most still looks like it must have when someone lived here, long ago. He fights the urge to go over and see what titles are left there, not wanting to know what kind of person it was that read those books, slept in that bed, used that computer.

In places, he can still make out the pattern of the wallpaper.

Now that light fills the room, Dean can see dark areas on the walls around the bed and desk. There has been a fire in this room, he realises. A fire big enough that it probably didn’t go out on its own. Someone must have extinguished it, fought to protect this house. It’s hard not to wonder what became of them.

When he looks out of the window, Dean sees the buildings around, the street leading out of town, and the dusty sky. Nothing else, and certainly no Cas. It’s a bit reckless of his friend to leave without a word and risk Dean worrying about him and going looking, which might lead to Cas coming back when Dean is away and leaving again to look for him, which might lead to them forever missing each other.

Or someone might come and abduct Dean in Castiel’s absence, though Dean doesn’t worry about that much. Not that he doesn’t think it could happen; he’s merely learned from experience that in a case like that Cas would be impressively useless.

He’d probably just leave Dean behind again. He has a talent for that, after all…

They’d walked until they reached the edge of town. Not daring to move along the empty, unprotected street over to the next one in a darkness that hinders the eyes of no creature but them, they were forced to find a house to stay in. Were he to look to the left, Dean would see the street go around a corner and on towards the house with the crosses, somewhere out of sight.

Cas could at least have left a note, Dean decides. There’s enough dust to write in, after all.

He turns away from the window and makes his way down the stairs. The ground floor is a lot darker because here all the windows have been barred shut. Someone survived the destruction of the city and lived here afterwards. He wonders why they never took care of the room upstairs – it would have offered better protection than the rooms on ground level.

Perhaps limiting their life to few rooms was easier and safer. Still, they should have barred the window, at least.

The furniture here is in better condition. There’s a couch that still invites sitting, a few chairs that look okay but turn out to be infected with the disease called time when Dean touches them. The table looks more stable, but even in the meagre light that falls through the cracks where boards are missing before the windows, Dean can tell that it isn’t custom made but has been created with rough materials by someone who didn’t understand much about table-making.

It’s hard to breathe, here. No matter what Dean does, the tightness in his chest doesn’t disappear. He wishes Cas were back already, so they could pack and go. They have no time to linger here, and he woke far too late into the day anyway.

Cas should have woken him and not wasted their time by being nowhere to be found.

There are more rooms down here. The living-and-dining room blends into a small kitchen where two cups are still standing beside a powerless refrigerator, as if waiting for their owners to come home. The refrigerator is filled with boxes, used as storage after becoming useless for anything else. There are bowls and baskets standing around, but whatever they contained has turned to earth long ago.

Spiders sit in the corners and don’t care much when Dean passes. The floorboards creak as he walks on them – he needn’t have worried about anything creeping closer at night; this house wouldn’t let them.

What used to be a small bathroom has turned into a black hole full of insects and small things that scatter away in the dark, and Dean closes the door as soon as he opens it.

There are two more doors on the ground floor. One leads outside to the backyard – the small glass windows in the upper part are still whole and allow light to fall into the room, filtered by the dirt that painted them brownish with time. The other door leads to another bedroom. Dust whirls up when the door opens with a loud creak and dances in rays of pale light.

The room is little bigger than the one upstairs, so there’s not much space left beside the king-sized double bed inside. The bars before the windows are mostly gone, though they seem to have been destroyed by nature and time rather than by other forces. The large gaps allow enough light to fall in for Dean to make out everything: the dirty carpet, the half-rotten sheets on the bed, the open closet. Traces of animals in the dust.

There are bones lying around the bed, on the floor. Not many, but enough for him to tell that these are human remains. Some are on the bed, too – Dean finds half a skull lying between the folds of what used to be a quilt. Another has rolled under the bed – or been dragged there. Whoever these people used to be, animals took care of them many, many years ago.

Dean feels like he’s disturbing them by standing in the room that became their tomb, even though he knows better than anyone that the dead don’t care. Not if they are truly gone, and these two, they moved on long ago, just like all the other ones killed in the war.

(With so many violent deaths, Dean has been surprised that no one seems to have lingered here. This world truly offers nothing to stay for, not even for ghosts.)

But he’s the one who killed them, and here he stands, feeling slightly upset about the life they were forced to live after the catastrophe reduced their home to rotting walls and bars before the windows.

It’s here, in the house of people who didn’t die with the city but lived on to grieve and suffer and hate the one responsible for this that it hits Dean. He did this. Everything these people went through, every loss, all the desperation they must have felt is his fault. And whatever he tried to tell himself about having had no other choice, about the alternative having been even worse is a load if bullshit. Because he gave Michael the power to do this in order to stop Lucifer, but Lucifer never needed to be stopped. Dean’s goddamn brother never gave in and all this, all this wouldn’t have had to happen.

Dean might not have pulled the trigger, but he’s the one who handed over the gun and the guilt is the same.

The dust that got into Dean’s throat, his lungs, begins to choke him. He needs to get out. With a weak cough and a hand at his throat he turns away, feels blindly for the door to the backyard.

The air is no clearer there. Dean stumbles forward over patches of dead grass and finally comes to a halt near the wall that once separated this ground from the neighbour’s.

The neighbour’s house is gone. Cas is standing in the middle of the small yard, a blurred shape through the water in Dean’s eyes. Doesn’t seem to care that Dean’s choking. Dean doesn’t really care himself. The lack of air sits like a lump in his throat but his mind is busy elsewhere.

There is a wooden cross right before Dean, brittle and splintering. A single name has been carved into it, and beneath it numbers that have long since been eaten by weather and sand.

Dean throws up beside it. There’s almost nothing in his stomach, but he keeps on heaving long after the last of his sparse breakfast has splattered onto the ground.

When he finally looks up, gasping for air and with tears running down his face, Castiel is still standing in the yard, holding a knife in one hand and the skinned body of some small creature in the other. His hands are red, but he’s not working anymore. Just stands there, looking at Dean with that blank stare that would have made Dean want to punch him on any other day and now only makes him want to cry harder.

Eventually, Cas places knife and carcass on the ground and comes over to where Dean is kneeling between grave and vomit. “What’s wrong?” he asks, his voice even and calm. Interested, not worried.

“Everything’s wrong!” Dean yells. Yelling isn’t smart, anyone might hear him. Doesn’t matter, since his voice comes out croaking anyway. It would have to be louder for the information to get into Castiel’s head. “Everything! Oh God.” Dean retches again. “Oh God. It’s all gone.”

Castiel says nothing. He reaches out, however, when Dean stumbles to his feet and keeps him from falling down again.

Dean jerks his arm away and stumbles backwards against the wall. “Fuck off, Cas,” he growls, hoarsely. “How can you even stand to be near me?”

“Dean.” Cas steps closer again, his voice suddenly urgent. “Did you remember?”

“Fuck you! No, I didn’t. I just finally fucking got it!” Dean feels like hitting his head against the wall and does so before the thought even registers. He wishes he could knock himself out, but Cas grabs him and pulls him away from the bricks. Leaving smears of rabbit blood on his shirt.

“Stop it!” the angel says sharply. Orders it. Dean wants to laugh. He looks up, at the ruins around him and he sky, the fucking invisible sky. Imagines this world full of people, full of shops and parks and kids walking their dogs. Tries to imagine them all dying, instantly or slowly, completely helpless. Wiped out on a whim. But it’s too much. His mind capitulates before this guilt.

“Leave me the fuck alone,” Dean cries. “Just go away, Cas. What do you even drag me along for? What good could I possibly do for anyone?” The last words he yells, his voice finally as strong as he wants it to be. “This is all my fault! Because I was wrong about everything. And it _wasn’t worth it_!”

Castiel breathes out sharply, something between a snort and a sigh. “It wasn’t,” he confirms.

“Forget Lucifer,” Dean mutters, turning away. He wishes Cas would just fucking leave him alone already. “I’m the worst thing that ever happened to this world.”

“You’re just a man;” Cas says, though Dean doesn’t know if that’s supposed to be comforting, or if the angel thinks he’s giving himself too much credit.

“I destroyed the world!” Dean shouts back. “And maybe-”

Maybe he knew this was going to happen. Maybe he didn’t fucking care. Maybe he was so absorbed in his own pain that he couldn’t even look this far.

Maybe Dean’s conviction that he did what seemed best at the time was just a delusion because he didn’t want to face the fact that he was just that much of a selfish bastard. He thought he had to protect the world from Lucifer? That would make more sense if he’d waited until the world actually _needed_ to be protected from Lucifer.

Dean’s brother never gave in, and it’s hard to believe Dean ever really thought he would. Not if they were as close as Castiel told him.

“No one stopped me,” Dean mutters.

“We tried.” Cas sounds gentler now, or perhaps he’s just quieter because he’s so far away. Dean feels like he’s falling. He doesn’t care what Cas says – it’s all wrapped in cotton anyway. “We spent years and years trying to stop Michael.”

“Not Michael. Me. Should never have let me say yes.”

Then Dean remembers that they tried to stop him. Locked him up and all. Good plan. Only his stupid idiot of a brother who didn’t even manage to say yes to the devil had to go and let him out again, due to some misguided belief Dean would somehow be better than he was. The guy was obviously an idiot, because if he’d really known Dean he would have known what a worthless piece of scum he is.

Should have let him rot in that basement.

“Just fucking leave already!” Dean is hardly aware of the tears on his face and doesn’t care. “You don’t need me anyway. If you take me along, I’ll jut fuck it up again.” He sinks to the ground and wraps his arms around his knees, muttering, “Just leave me here for the demons to find.”

“You are being irrational,” Cas tells him. “Come inside.”

“You’re the one who’s irrational. This is your chance to get rid of me. Go on, take it!”

“Dean,” Cas says. “I don’t want to get rid of you. And I’m not leaving you when I waited so long to get you back. Let’s get inside and we will talk.” He takes Dean’s arm and pulls him to his feet. Dean lets it happen, feeling lightheaded and strangely disoriented. Moments later he is inside the house with no recollection of how he got there.

The empty rooms offer no consolation.

“Let’s go somewhere else,” he says, sounding like a child even to his own ears. “Please. I don’t want to be here.”

“This house offers shelter. There’s no point in going somewhere else.”

“Not here,” Dean insists. “Let’s just move on.”

“A minute ago you wanted me to leave you here,” Cas points out. A cool, dry palm is pressed against Dean’s forehead, then the angel says, “You’re not well. We’ll rest here for a while.”

“No!” The suffocating feeling is back. Dean needs to get out. He tries, but Cas holds him back. And everything is spinning around him, sucking the thoughts right out of his head.

When he finds himself again, the light has changed. He looks around in confusion and sees empty walls, a bare floor. Like a construction side, a building not yet moved into. Dean feels too drained to be confused. His head hurts.

His arms are trembling as he pushes himself up. He’s lying on the floor, cushioned by a collection of furs and old, stained blankets. The books they used to carry around inside the furs are sitting in three small stacks beside him. Castiel is sitting on the floor, leaning against the wall, an open book in his lap. He’s looking at Dean.

“You’re sick,” he informs him. “I decided to let you sleep.”

Dean looks around again. He still doesn’t recognize the room. “Where are we?”

“In a house near the one we stayed in before.”

“Why did we move?”

Castiel crooks his head to the side. “The other place seemed to upset you. I thought maybe you’d feel better here.”

Frowning, Dean tries to think back, but his thoughts jumble at the attempt. He feels slightly sick. “What happened?”

“You passed out. Don’t you remember?”

“Not much. I... Oh God.”

He does remember. The guilt, the self-loathing and shame, the overwhelming wish to die. Dean remembers, but it’s different now. Distant. As if his mind has gotten used to it and decided to move on.

What remains is still bad enough to make him bury his face in his hands. He remains sitting like that until gentle hands take hold of his shoulders and push him back down.

After that, Dean supposes he must have fallen asleep again, though it can’t have been long. The light hasn’t changed much. From his position on the floor he can’t see much through the window, but the sky has brightened a little. By his estimation, it’s late morning.

When he woke up in the other house it was already noon, so he must have been out the entire night.

Castiel hands him water and food. At some point he roasted the rabbits he caught. Dean doesn’t feel like eating, but does so anyway. Afterwards he lies back down and listens as Cas tells him about the man he used to be. About how he fought to stop the apocalypse from happening. About how he took responsibility for the entire planet and stood against heaven and hell, no matter how much he’d already been suffering. About how impressed Castiel was, how he inspired the angel to pick a side and think for himself instead of simply following orders.

According to Cas, Dean used to be the strongest, person who ever lived, standing up for what he believed in, no matter how hard and painful it was. It’s a long shot from the things he told Dean before.

Maybe he should be sick more often.

“Your bedside manners aren’t that bad,” he declares in the evening, when he wakes up after another nap to Castiel cleaning his face of sweat with a cloth.

“I have had a lot of practice.”

Right. “Seems you actually do know how to make someone feel better instead of worse. Too bad it isn’t working. ‘Cause, you know, I keep remembering that there’s a reason why you wanted to make me feel bad until now, so all that praise doesn’t really ring true.”

Dean is actually feeling better now, physically. All these thoughts have been in his head all day, but until now he’s been too numb and miserable for much emotional involvement.

“It’s the truth.”

“Oh, so then you were lying to me before?” Dean’s voice drops like acid. It’s beginning to come back to him just how much of a worthless piece of shit he is, and the last thing he wants is someone telling him otherwise out of pity.

“That was the truth as well. I found that in many cases truth is a matter of perspective.” Castiel sits back and fold his legs under his body. He doesn’t give the impression of intending to leave Dean alone anytime soon. “The fact that I am… embittered about the path you have chosen doesn’t erase the fact that you were the first person to see more in me than a weapon of heaven – to teach me that I _could_ be more. And my bitterness is also grounded in my own guilt over being unable to protect you from your own choices. Had I been a better friend to you, you might not have been driven to Michael. As I said before, at that time, you felt like you had no other choice.”

Too quick to forgive Dean now he’s running a risk of losing him. It doesn’t sit well, and all the words ring hollow. Perhaps Cas has been lying to Dean every time he made excuses for his choices, tried to soften the blow of his failure right after dealing it.

Perhaps he’s been lying to Dean about everything, all the time. Dean has been all too happy to believe him when he was told he had no choice, that he meant well, that he was manipulated into doing what he did, that he never meant to hurt anyone. If they’ve really been as close once as Castiel wants to make him believe, the angel would know what to tell him to steer him exactly where he wants him to go.

Suddenly, absurdly, Dean finds himself wishing Michael was here.

He doesn’t dwell on the notion. Instead, he rolls over to face the wall. “Okay,” he mumbles. “Whatever.” He closes his eyes and pretends to sleep.

 

-

 

They stay in the house for another day. There’s nowhere they have to be at the moment, and Cas seems to feel safe here, which is ironic enough. He insists on staying put until Dean is back on his feet and uses the time to go through the books. Every time Dean wakes from his slumber, Cas is sitting beside him, reading, sometimes marking pages. There are three stacks around him: “unread” and what Dean would like to call “useful” and “not useful”, but what he suspects is actually “useless” and “slightly less useless”. Only at night does Cas take a break, but that’s probably only due to the lack of light.

In the morning, Dean starts as well. To him, there are two basic piles: “English” and “everything else”. And some where he isn’t that sure on first sight. Not all of the books are from the time before the world ended and everything went out of print. There are handwritten copies among them, and while Dean appreciates the work put into them, he wishes those people would have paid more attention to making their letters clearly distinguishable.

Some of the books have been printed, but obviously by primitive means. There are crooked pages, some types have been set wrong, and the pages are not numbered. Dean settles with a volume for a while that is rather slim compared to some others and quite interesting once he gets into it. Reading it is easy because he feels like he already knew most of what the book tells him and only needs a few words to bring the memory back to the surface.

The book is called _Angels (Facts, Dangers and Protections) Volume II_ by Robert Singer and leaves Dean wishing they had found the first volume as well.

It doesn’t tell him anything about how to kill Lucifer, though. The devil isn’t mentioned in this one; it’s a general description about angels, their strengths and weaknesses, how to ward against them and what, contrary to common lore, doesn’t work. References back to the first volume indicate that that one deals with the whole vessel business and also introduced the most important players. Dean wonders if it mentions Castiel at all. He’s certain there’s something about Lucifer in that book. And about Michael.

He can only speculate on what someone who didn’t know him had to say about him and his consent.

The next book Dean picks up is a lot thicker and completely useless. All the information it offers on angels is basically what can also be found in the bible, or in a conversation with an especially gullible priest. No mention on them being self-centred sons of bitches without a hint of decency or mercy inside them. And Lucifer – well, Lucifer is evil and temptation and has to be fought by everyone through living an upstanding, faithful and virtuous life, yadda, yadda. Dean tosses the book aside after scanning a couple of pages, just glad that he won’t have to carry it around any longer.

It’s a pity they can’t risk making a fire, else he would have proposed burning the thing for warmth.

Eventually he ends up with the narrow, leather-bound volume he first picked up. Recalling that he saw something about Lucifer inside when he flipped through it in the library, he starts at the beginning. It’s not very thick.

It becomes clear quickly that he was wrong: He thought it was someone’s journal, but the way it is written involves many explanations for outsiders and not a single personal detail. Also, it looks like the author made an effort to write in clear, readable letters – Dean can tell because every now and then he (or she) got carried away and the handwriting deteriorated to something barely recognizable. He can still read it with surprising ease.

Whoever has written this knew his angels. There is detailed information on angels in general, about what they can do to a person, about how they would lie and seduce. The author wrote about angels appearing in their vessels’ dreams in the form of loved ones to talk them into giving their consent, how they would offer support in times of desperation and always present themselves as the best possible option.

He also warns about the consequences of letting an angel take over – not just the general consequence of putting the plutonium into a nuclear weapon, but also what happens to the vessel. The vessel will lose all touch with humanity, Dean learns. The angel they let in doesn’t care about their friends and families, will smite them along with everyone else if it seems convenient. There is no way of controlling what happens once the angel is inside – who hands their body over to an agent of heaven does so completely, and often forever. Once an angel has found a perfect vessel, they rarely let it go. Consent means goodbye forever. The vessels might just as well kill themselves, but if by happenstance they are let go one day, it might be to a world where everyone they knew and loved is long since gone.

And the more powerful the angel, the worse the state of the discarded vessel. Lesser angels can leave their vessels traumatized and broken. Higher angels often leave them human vegetables, their minds burned out by the power that filled them.

Altogether, Dean seems to have gotten off lucky. (He doesn’t feel lucky, though.)

There’s even a chapter dedicated to Lucifer and his vessels. The vessels he takes as replacement for the one he can’t have. Since he’s long since burned through the few vessels that were even a little bit suitable for him, he has resorted to taking anyone who would have him. The author warns of his seduction, warns not to listen to his promises, draws a disgusting picture of bodies that decay while still alive, rotting as the power inside them eats their flesh. It makes Dean think of the boy Lucifer was occupying when they met. The unknown author knew what he was writing about.

Dean checks the first page and the last, but there is no name to this very interesting book.

“This one looks promising,” he tells the room in general while flipping back to the page he’s been reading and then onwards, looking for the right words to catch his eyes. They don’t come. “Doesn’t seem to tell us how to kill an archangel, though.”

“Give it to me,” Cas tells him. Dean hands the book over without comment – maybe Cas can find something inside that he missed in his brief exploration.

Dean turns his attention to the next book. When after a few minutes he looks up, Cas is still sitting there with the book in his hand, tracing the lines of words with his fingertips. Dean can tell from the movement of his eyes that he’s not reading – he’s just looking at the book, and the expression on his face is of infinite sadness.

Dean doesn’t ask. He swallows, though, as if it meant something to him.

 

-

 

It’s in the evening that Dean comes across something useful. The book that gives him the information isn’t _Angels, Volume I_ , but it was written by the same author, and it makes Dean wish they had a lot more works by the guy. At least his books were written after the apocalypse started, not a long time before like most of the others, when no one had ever seen an angel and even those who believed they existed had to fall back on unreliable sources, tainted by religious beliefs and hopeless faith.

The book in question isn’t even mainly about angels. It’s about demons, and Dean isn’t quite certain how it got into his little collection. Probably because he didn’t really pay attention and just stole anything that mentioned angels in general or Lucifer in particular.

Or maybe it was Cas who added it to the collection. Dean doesn’t remember and most certainly doesn’t care. He has the book now, and the book tells him something about demons that don’t want Lucifer and would love to see him dead.

Cas mentioned before that not every demon is loyal to the devil but Dean never paid it much attention beyond the realisation that there are at least three groups to beware of. And even that didn’t really matter in the face of the fact that they generally couldn’t trust _anyone_.

But this book tells him that not only do these demons want the devil gone, they are also actively fighting to achieve their goal. Because apparently, Satan doesn’t like his own creations so very much, and they’d rather rule the world themselves instead of being his slaves and facing extinction as soon as he doesn’t need them anymore.

“So, these other demons, those that don’t want Lucifer,” Dean starts. “What about them? They must have come up with something, right? At least they must have an idea.”

Castiel’s expression is dark enough to count as a harbinger of the falling night. “No.”

“How do you know?”

“No, Dean, we will not go to them,” Cas clarifies. “We will not ask them. We will not work with them.”

Dean sets down the book. “Okay, I get it. You don’t like them. Neither do I – hell, I don’t even remember them and I already hate them. And I certainly don’t want to have anything to do with them. But if – just theoretically! – if they had a way of ganking Satan, shouldn’t we consider it? Would you rather let this war go on forever because of your principles? I’m not saying we should become friends with them.”

“Stop thinking in this direction. It’s a waste of your mental capabilities.”

“Just think-”

“We will not go anywhere near them,” Cas snaps. “And you know why? Because they would tear you apart the moment they saw you! They don’t love Lucifer, they fear Michael just as much. They will do anything to keep him out of his destined vessel, not to mention the fact that he killed many of them wearing your face. They don’t like you very much, Dean.”

“If they want Lucifer dead as badly as we do, they might listen to reason.”

“They’re _demons_ , Dean! Reason will tell them to destroy you. It’ll bring Michael a small disadvantage, but mostly it will be very satisfying for them to watch you suffer.”

“Maybe we can use that to our advantage,” Dean muses. He can’t say he likes the thought, but it’s there and refuses to go away. “We can make a deal. I mean, _I_ can make a deal. They help me, and in return...” He takes a deep breath, realising he doesn’t like the idea _at all_. “They get me.”

Castiel stares at him as if he lost his mind.

“I know demons are hardly trustworthy. But through a deal we could bind them to their word. And if they will torture me to death for it… Well.” It’s hard to keep looking at Castiel, but Dean does so anyway. So the angel realises he means this. “I guess that’s what I deserve.”

There’s silence following his words. Not a good silence. In the end, Cas takes a deep breath before answering – the kind of deep breath that tells Dean that his reply would have been vastly different if he’d given it before that breath.

“Putting aside that this is the most idiotic plan I have _ever_ heard,” the fallen angel says, “what makes you so insistent that I hand you over to the enemy after fighting so long to get you back? What they’d do to you,” he continues before Dean can say anything, “is beyond what you can imagine. If you still had your memories of hell, you wouldn’t even think to propose this. And while there are beings who would deserve that torture, you are not amongst them. I wouldn’t allow you to do that, even if I hadn’t vowed to Sam that I would protect you. Even if it wasn’t utterly _pointless_.”

“What do you mean?”

“They are _demons_ , Dean. Even if they were to defeat Lucifer, they are hardly aiming for peaceful coexistence with the human race. The moment Lucifer and his followers are gone and the angels returned to heaven, they will come out of hiding and take this world as theirs.”

“That’s why I want to bind them to a deal.”

“You’d only make it worse if you did that,” Cas snaps. “They wouldn’t be stopping at just torturing you. When I got you out of hell all those years ago, you were on the verge of becoming a demon yourself. They would complete that process. Because only if you stop being you will you become useless as a vessel to Michael.”

Dean opens his mouth for a reply and snaps it shut again. He simply doesn’t know what to say, since he doesn’t want to give up this idea, doesn’t want to take the easy way out this time. And he’d be willing to take the torture.

But becoming a demon? Becoming something else, something that has all his memories but enjoys killing and maiming? That is worse than being an archangel’s vessel, even if he wouldn’t be nearly as powerful and the potential for destruction not nearly as total.

“They would use you for their battles and you would join them willingly,” Castiel tells him. “And it would accomplish nothing but exchanging one hell with another.”

“But it’s _something_!” There’s anger in Dean’s voice, as well as desperation. “You don’t have any clue how to go about killing the devil, and I don’t think there’ll be anything really useful in these books. You know that as well as me! What did you hope to accomplish with this, anyway? Keep us busy?  Replace the hopeless task of separating me from Michael with another hopeless task? Is this some kind of hobby for you?” There’s really no point in getting angry with Cas, but Dean can’t help himself. This is all so pointless, and Cas is lying to him and fighting against any attempt of Dean’s to actually come up with something useful. “It’s like you don’t even _want_ to really try. What harm can come from at least thinking about this? Those demons are the only ones with the same goal as us and the only ones who might have found something we didn’t. If we give it some thought…”

“They don’t have anything,” Castiel insists. “I assure you of it. They are too cowardly to actively go against Lucifer themselves. And Lucifer knows their names. He’s hunting for them. So their numbers are by now very small, and there is little connection between them. Gathering in one place would attract attention. They would sooner betray each other than effectively work together. Nowadays, they do their best to stay out of sight and hope to survive long enough until the whole thing is over.”

“And yet you are convinced they would go out of their way to torture me into becoming one of them.”

Castiel’s sigh sounds irritated, as if the angel can’t see why this isn’t obvious. “They’d drag you into their own little hidden corner of hell, Dean. Dragging a soul into hell is ridiculously easy if someone makes a deal for it. And after you’re a demon, they would send you out, full of fresh hatred and the desire for blood and pain, and have you kill as many fallen angels and demons on Lucifer’s side as possible before someone takes you out. You would make a powerful demon.”

“How do you know that?”

“You’re Michael’s vessel. Had he been given the time to turn you completely, you would have easily matched and then surpassed Alistair in power.”

Dean doesn’t know who Alistair is; the name sends shivers down his spine, though. He doesn’t ask.

What he does ask is, “How come you know so much about those demons?”

Castiel sighs again, but less irritated this time. “We got the same idea as you, once. Thought they might know a way to get to Michael. You and Sam had met their leader, a demon named Crowley, before. He had provided you with a gun that could kill anything and send you after the devil.” He raises his hand before Dean can get his hopes up. “It turned out the gun doesn’t work on Lucifer. Ever since then, Crowley has been in hiding. He blames you two for the fate that waits for him should he ever get caught. But Sam was willing to take the risk. He was powerful enough to exorcise a demon like Crowley without effort, so we felt safe enough.”

“But you weren’t?”

“Oh, we were, at first. Or so it seemed. Most demons were too scared to even get close to us. Crowley met us, told us about certain exorcisms that can banish angels without killing the vessel. It seemed plausible enough – Alistair had once nearly succeeded in exorcising me. Crowley taught them to us without much fuss, which should have made us suspicious. But he would profit from Michael losing you as well, so we thought mutual interest would prevent his betrayal – or at least postpone it until we accomplished our goal.”

“He betrayed you? How? The ritual didn’t work?”

“We never made it that far.” Castiel sounds bitter now. “Sam went alone. Didn’t trust Crowley after all, in the end, I suppose. I was asleep and didn’t notice. I needed a long time to get used to the need for sleep.” It sounds like an excuse. Or maybe it’s just an explanation. “I followed when I woke, but it was too late. Crowley’s lackeys had already ambushed Sam. Those demons came to the conclusion that rather than take a risk and aim for a permanent solution that might backfire, they would play it safe and be satisfied with keeping Lucifer from ever possessing his true vessel.”

“What did they do? Drag him to hell? Try to turn him into a demon?”

Castiel shakes his head. “They couldn’t, not without a deal. At that time, Sam still went to heaven when he died. No, they only tried to keep his body out of reach. They put Sam into a block of concrete along with some hex-bags that would hide his position, decorated the block with angel-repelling symbols and threw it into the ocean.” The corner of Cas’ mouth twitches. “Sam was alive when they closed him in.”

“Okay, I get it! Dean explodes. He gets up, starts to pace. “Your friend was awesome and he had to go through a lot, and it’s all my fault. Fine. I feel appropriately guilty about it. But please stop telling me about it like it should influence everything I do. If you want to base every decision you make on him, fine, but I won’t do that. I _can’t_ do it. Because, to be absolutely honest, I don’t care.” Dean takes a deep breath, while Cas stares at him as if his human had just grown a second head. He doesn’t seem to know what to say, but that’s okay because Dean isn’t finished yet. “I just don’t _care_ ,” he says, calmer and with great emphasis, so Cas will get it. “I don’t remember him. I don’t even _want_ to remember him. So maybe once he meant a lot to me, but now he doesn’t. And yeah, what happened to him was terrible, and I wouldn’t wish it on anyone, and I’m _sorry_ it all happened because of me, I really am. But in the end his fate doesn’t bother me any more than that of any other human who suffered and died here. Less, even – your tale about the people Lucifer and his demons crucified over there? That once affected me much more than anything you ever told me about your poor, brave companion. So please just stop, okay? It’s beginning to get on my nerves.”

It feels good, having said that (except in all the ways it didn’t). Dean needed to get that out, seriously, because all this talk of this guy he didn’t know was driving him crazy. And sure, this wasn’t the most diplomatic way to say it, but if Cas had spoken one more word about his friend as if Dean was an even worse person for not remembering him, he would have grabbed his gun and seen how much was left of Cas’ immortality. In this regard, the fallen angel has gotten off lightly, all things considered. And Dean isn’t sorry, even though he knows Cas will be unbearable now and they’ll probably have a fight, and Cas might throw things at him he doesn’t want to hear.

He still can’t bring himself to regret it. Because it’s all true, and it _had_ to be said.

Though, he has to admit, to Cas it must have come out of nowhere. Dean doesn’t really know himself where that came from.

He only knows that it is good. If it means shutting Cas up about this forever, Dean is more than willing to accept some hurt feelings.

“Your brother,” Cas says. He doesn’t sound angry – it’s Dean’s anger that flares up.

“Yeah, I fucking know that. And I just told you that it doesn’t matter!”

“Your brother,” Cas repeats, unfazed. “What’s his name?”

Dean stares at him, still angry, while he tries to figure out what his friend is talking about. “What the fuck, Cas?”

“Your brother has a name, Dean. I merely want you to say it.”

Dean snaps? “Why? ‘This some kind of sick game for you?”

“No.”

“Then why the hell do you want me to say his name?”

“Because you never do.” Castiel finally, finally gets to his feet again so he can look into Dean’s eyes as he says, “In all this time, you have avoided saying his name. You call him your brother as if it meant nothing, or you speak of my friend. I merely want you to say it.”

Dean did say it, at least once. He still remembers the taste of the word on his tongue. “I did say it.”

“Say it again. That is all I ask. I will let it go after that.”

This is idiotic. Silly and childish. Dean says so, but Castiel insists. So Dean will play his game. He’ll say the stupid name if it’ll grant him peace. He’ll spit it into Cas’ face and if he’s lucky, his dear angel will choke on it.

So Dean stares into Cas’ face and his lips don’t move. He wants to say the damn name, but he doesn’t. Seconds pass, turn into minutes in Dean’s mind.

It’s just a single, short, simple word. (Three letters, six actually, but no one ever says it like that. Five letters for Dean.) But no matter how much Dean wants to say it, something inside him refuses to. He tries to say it in his mind but the name slips from his thoughts, over and over again.

And all the time he’s glaring at Cas, unmoving, like an angry child that refuses to play the game with someone else’s rules. “What are you trying to get from this?” he hisses. “Is this some kind of power game? You get a kick out of making me say something idiotic just because you can?”

“It’s just a question,” Cas says, softer than before. “What’s your brother’s name, Dean?”

“Adam.” Dean spits the name out with something between a grin and a snarl. A stubborn child deliberately giving the wrong answer, just to piss the other off. “There you have it. My brother.”

“The other one.”

“What does it matter? They’re both dead.” With that, Dean turns away and walks over to the window. The conversation is over for him. Still, he wants to throw the other name over his shoulder, just to prove to Cas that whatever he’s thinking, it’s wrong. And stupid. Dean can say the name.

But he doesn’t.

 

FYI, there’s going to be a chapter break here.

 

They leave the house after one more night. Dean is feeling well again, and Cas has found something in those books after all. Bits and pieces, none of which are making much sense on their own. Together, however, they form a picture – a picture that Dean still wouldn’t have been able to see. Even Cas only did because he knew what he was looking for. From what he told Dean, the human can tell that his friend has been looking for something in particular for a long time, collecting hints and deducting the core of truth from folklore. His quest has been made all the more difficult since most literature was destroyed and the remains of the human race have other things to worry about than pass on stories, but bit by bit, piece by piece Cas is getting his picture.

“You couldn’t have told me that before, could you?” Dean complains, sometime around midday, with his shirt clinging to his back beneath his pack, despite the cold air. The pack is lighter now, since they left most of the books behind. Among the ones they kept were the handwritten, nameless journal, the books by Singer and – naturally – the thick and heavy pictured dictionary of the supernatural.

Would’ve been nice if Cas had taken over some of the load of books. On the other hand, it is up to _him_ to carry a couple of freshly hunted cadavers, so Dean doesn’t complain out loud – he is older than twelve and therefore doesn’t think dead rabbits hanging off his belt are in any way cool.

“I could have,” Cas admits openly. Well, some confession – of course he could have. If he’d taken a second between psycho-analysing Dean and snickering to himself internally over how easy it is to keep him in the dark about pretty much everything. “It would have been counter-productive, though,” the angel adds.

“How so?”

“The way I found is very risky and likely to not work. It would have been good to find a better possibility. Had I told you, your mind would have been tuned in to my idea. You might have missed important clues.”

“Is that why you made me drag tons of books on angels and demons around half the globe when actually you were looking for information on something that’s neither hell nor heaven?”

“Yes,” Cas replies unashamedly.

“Oh, fine. But when I did come up with a better idea, you didn’t want to hear about it.”

“That’s because your idea wasn’t better, it was worse.”

“I still think it’s worth a shot. All we need is leverage. At least we should go and see if the demons have an idea that would work if anyone had the courage to actually try.”

“I told you why we won’t,” Cas says irritably.

“You told me why _you_ won’t,” Dean snaps back. “In fact, all you told me is that you won’t go near them because they hurt your precious boyfriend. Beside your grudge, I don’t see any real reason for us to possibly miss a good opportunity. Okay, it’s a risk, but which fucking plan against Satan isn’t?”

Throwing a glare at Dean, Cas says, “So you do want to discuss this after all? I’m warning you, mentioning your brother is probably not to be avoided.”

Well, if Cas wants to be childish, Dean can be as well. He doesn’t say anything for a long time, and when he finally speaks – during a break, with his mouth half-full of roasted rabbit – it’s to ask about their destination.

“Milwaukee,” Cas informs him, and Dean nearly spits his rabbit at him. “You’re kidding!”

“Not at all.”

“That’s…” Dean tries to do the math, but his mind protects him from the reality of his situation by disabling his mathematic abilities. “We’ll need year to walk that far.”

“I didn’t know you were in a hurry.” The words are spoken so earnestly that Dean isn’t sure they aren’t meant just like that. Cas had been walking the earth for centuries, after all. What are a few more years, to him? Especially considering that his brilliant plan for Devil-killing will most likely kill him, too, so maybe he wants to draw out his goodbye.

“I’d like to get somewhere this lifetime,” Dean complains. “Especially with all of hell and heaven on our asses I’d like this to be over sooner rather than later. And somehow I can’t get over the feeling that once we got to Milwaukee, we’re just going to get what you’re after and walk all the way back to Tallahassee.”

“What would we do in Tallahassee?” Cas looks genuinely puzzled.

“You know what I mean.” Dean waves the whole argument away with a generous gesture when Cas still looks at him like he really, really doesn’t. “What is it you want there, anyway?”

“Information.”

“Figures. And you’re not worried your informants will be dead by the time we arrive?”

“That is highly unlikely. However, I had planned to ease our travels by taking horses.”

“Horses?” Despite the surprise Cas’ words invoke, all Dean can do is scowl at him. He remembers that the fallen angel mentioned some settlements were breeding cattle, but somehow, the thought that horses could live in this world never occurred to him. Somehow, he always thought everyone got everywhere by walking.

Probably because Cas has been setting such a fine example.

Also, he never saw any horses. Not even cows. He’s seen boar, rabbits, squirrels and one or two deer, beyond the forest in the living world, but never anything that was larger than a malnourished cat in the areas the humans call their own.

Although he might have heard a goat once or twice.

“I never saw any horses,” he says regardless, not keeping the scepticism out of his voice. “If they are still around, then why the hell have we been walking everywhere?”

“Because they are rare, and incredibly valuable,” Cas informs him. “No one would have liked to hand them to us.”

“Don’t you think our mission to save the world should grant us a few simple comforts? We could save the world so much quicker if we didn’t need years to get just about anywhere. Even the horse-owners must be able to see that.”

“We haven’t been on such a mission until very recently,” Cas reminds him. “Also,” he adds, “the places we have been before didn’t have horses. Pamela’s camp, the one we first visited, used to have a few, but they have died long ago.”

Well, that explains some of it. “You’re trying to tell me that those hunters we’ve been running from don’t have horses? I bet if ever someone came the long way there on horseback, those asshats confiscated the ride.”

“I would assume so, too. I did hear a horse once, while in the town,” Cas admits, and Dean feels like strangling him.

“Then why didn’t we steal it? We stole so much from them, why not for a change something actually worth it?” Thinking of the long days of walking with tons of books in his bag, Dean has a hard time trying not to yell.

“Because if we had done so, they wouldn’t have given up the chase as quickly. They would likely have caught us, and then my journey, at least, would have been over. In a matter or minutes, if we’d been lucky.”

It seems like an excuse. Dean feels strung along more than ever; like Castiel is keeping secrets left and right for no other reason than to inconvenience him. Or maybe to test out how far he can go.

Dean can’t put his finger on the reason, but something shifted in him in that moment when the world crashed down on him for that brief, terrible minute of enlightenment, and that something has everything to do with Castiel and his behaviour. Somehow, for whatever reason that seems unfathomable from where he’s now standing, Dean has been far too willing to believe him everything he said. Frustrated with his secrets, yes, but swallowing all the information he was given which a naivety that makes him think of Michael, and how easy it would have been to trust him.

With Michael, this desire to believe him set off all of Dean’s alarm in a heartbeat. With Castiel it’s much subtler, and thus much more dangerous.

Dean still doesn’t know what kind of game his heavenly companion is playing. He only knows that every side wants to use him for something, and no side is willing to let him make his own decisions.

He doesn’t even know how many sides, exactly, there are.

“And what makes you think anyone will hand over their horses to us now?” he asks with a sigh, resigning himself to the fact that he’ll have to pick out the truth about pretty much everything between the crumbs of information and lies Castiel throws him.

The answer he gets is silence, and when Dean looks over to Cas, the other looks at the earth between them, his face set in the dark mask he always wears when he doesn’t want to mention something.

“Well?” Dean ask.

“There is a settlement about two days from here. It’s large and healthy. They have horses. They can spare two.”

“Okay, fine, but why would they?”

Cas grimaces, as if in pain. “Because I’m an angel and you are Michael’s destined vessel.”

 

-

 

So basically it comes down to the fact that the community is made of religious fanatics who will do anything to aid the angels in their war, genuinely believing them to be a force of good and hoping for a place in paradise, in heaven if not on earth. Looking at the world around them, Dean struggles to actually believe that, but Cas, of course, isn’t shy of an explanation.

The humans have been torn from their normal life in an instant to be faced with death and terror all around them. They came face-to-face with monsters and demons they never even knew existed; from one moment to the next all their nightmares came true. The comforts of their civilisation were gone, they lost friends and family and hunger became a constant for those who survived. And in all of that the realisation got stronger and stronger that it would never again be as it once was. It was easy, then, to lose themselves to despair and hopelessness, so those who had faith clung to it. And when they learned – if they ever did – that angels were real and walking among them fighting the demons, they felt less abandoned, more hopeful. They believed the angels would save the world, or at least them and their families. They prayed fiercely, took every small improvement as a sign from God and refused to see the truth about the heavenly host even if someone told them.

Most of the humans still inhabiting earth, Dean learns, don’t even know that it was Michael who is responsible for much of their suffering. And if confronted with undeniable proof, they would come up with explanations. It was nothing but just punishment. It only hit those who deserved it.

The people that now form this community grew up as the chosen of God.

Dean thinks they are close-minded, delusional collaborators for clinging to a belief that has long since been handed over to ridicule and doesn’t hesitate to say so. Castiel looks at him and says, “They believe because they have to.”

“You seem to understand human nature surprisingly well for a guy who never experienced it first hand,” Dean growls.

“I don’t. Sam explained it to me.”

And here they are again. Rolling his eyes, Dean moves on to the obvious next question. “They never met an angel, huh?”

“They did. As far as I know angels like to visit this place. They show the people there generosity and small favours, further cementing their faith.”

“Why? Seriously, what use can such a handful of humans be to the heavenly host?”

“No use as such. They simply…” Cas hesitates, then pulls himself straight and finishes, “Some angels simply enjoy the worship they are shown there. Humans kneel before them and believe them above and beyond any doubt and flaw.”

“So they are after the ego-boost.” Dean grimaces. “Yeah, that’s positively angelic.”

Cas doesn’t say anything in return, nor does he look at Dean. If the human didn’t know any better, he would say his companion was ashamed.

“And Michael was there as well?” Dean isn’t particularly looking forward to this experience. Walking to Milwaukee suddenly sounds a lot better than it did a few hours ago. “Seriously? He couldn’t even be bothered to come down and show his ass when he was trying to get me to consent as his vessel. Had Zachariah do all the work.”

A second later, Cas is behind Dean, who only realises his companion has stopped walking to stare incredulously at him after several steps onwards. “How do you know that?” the fallen angel asks, his face full of confusion and shock.

“Know wha- Oh..” There is a brief bout of nausea as something clicks in Dean’s head. The moment he realises he just used knowledge he shouldn’t have for his rather complete lack of memory, the knowledge is gone already and he only knows exactly what he just said, because he just told himself.

He feels a little like crying.

“Michael never came?” he asks quickly, hoping Cas will get that he doesn’t remember anymore and not insist on talking about it. Dean doesn’t want to. Just the thought of reflecting on his amnesia makes him want to vomit.

His own mind is making him sick.

Cas needs a moment before he answers, but when he does, he says, “No, he only interfered if he absolutely had to. When the great plan was threatened. Otherwise he had those loyal to him take care of things, including you.”

“But here he came,” Dean says, trying to stay in the present. Leave the past behind, it’s passed.

“Once, as far as I know.”

“How _do_ you know, anyway? Why would you even go there? I bet with you being fallen and the two of you rebelling against the big plan, those people can’t have liked you very much.”

“We didn’t know how they felt about angels before we got there,” Cas tells him, and something tells Dean that this will be another story he doesn’t want to hear. The life of Cas and his friend seems to have been made of them.

He doesn’t tell the angel to stop, though.

“Nor did we know that the angels coming to that place had told their followers to be on the lookout for us,” Cas continues, his voice casual, as if talking about the weather. (Cold, with many clouds and high chances for Armageddon.) “They handed Sam over to Michael, when he came. Me, they were allowed to keep.”

Despite Cas’ emotionless tone, that doesn’t sound like a story Dean would like to hear, or imagine. He doesn’t ask and hopes the topic will move on to something that doesn’t make something inside him was to scream on behalf of people he doesn’t trust or care about.

He wonders how Cas got away, how his friend got away. If that was when Michael… raped him pretending to be Dean. But he says nothing about that. Instead, he moves the conversation on to something that will be of more practical use to them right now than old stories about events that can’t be changed anymore. Not even if Dean did feel sorry.

“They know who you are,” Dean points out. “Don’t you think walking in there hoping they’ll just fall to their knees and give you everything you want might be a tad optimistic?”

“It would be.” Cas nods and looks Dean in the eyes for the first time in ages. “Which is why you will be the one asking.”

 

-

 

Cas plan might actually be good. He has depended on good plans for quite a long time now, and therefore must be able to make some. Evidently, since he isn’t dead yet. So, in conclusion, this plan might be a working one. Regardless, Dean hates it.

He doesn’t even want to analyse it in order to find weaknesses. It sucks, and he doesn’t want to follow it, period.

Unfortunately, he’s unable to offer an alternative, so they are stuck with it.

Dean would rather walk.

He has to play a part now, and while Castiel assured him that he used to pull cons left and right back in his old life, he’s not comfortable with the role his companion made up for him in this case.

Perhaps it’s only because it puts him in charge in an environment he doesn’t know anything about; perhaps it’s because it is too close to the truth. Usually, Dean wouldn’t mind people finding him awesome, but he doesn’t like the thought of them worshipping him for something that wasn’t awesome in the least.

Rejoice! Here comes the destroyer of your world!

Of course, the people they are about to meet have a different view on history in general, and Dean and Cas will have to play on that. So Dean will come to them as the vessel of Michael who lost his angel and is now on a holy mission in Michael’s name, and Cas is his prisoner, finally caught after centuries of evading justice. He has already been punished – the angel Castiel was burned out of him, and what remains is the host, sentenced to serving Michael’s glorious vessel for the rest of his life to make up for the crime of becoming the tool of a traitor before said traitor ever betrayed anyone.

It makes Dean sick. He says so. Castiel replies, “Call me Jimmy.”

So Dean does.

Without memories to back up Castiel’s claim of his conning abilities, Dean can only hope that once upon a time he used to be a better actor than he is now. He thinks everyone must be able to see right through their charade, but no one calls them on it.

And everyone is so happy to help them.

The first people greet them before they are even within viewing distance to the settlement. They stand by the side of the road and bow down when the two of them come closer, and when Dean tells them he isn’t Michael after all but only his vessel walking around independently while his angel is busy elsewhere, some of them seem heartbroken, some almost relieved. Either way, they are only too eager to follow his every order. He wants horses? He can have horses! The best there are, and they have plenty. And Michael will learn of this, right? Michael will make things better for them.

Dean would have liked to point out that things already _are_ better for them compared to what life is like for anyone else, no doubt thanks to the angels blessing their community – or simply protecting it when they levelled the area around it.

The destruction of the world, Dean has learned, didn’t happen all at once. The cities fell one after another, the survivors of one attack fleeing to the untouched areas until those were destroyed as well. It took decades before most of the United States were gone.

What happened to the rest of the world, Dean can only guess. Communications are down, travel impossible. Perhaps the other continents are better off due to the simple fact that they don’t host any of the angels’ favourite targets.

Perhaps they are just gone.

In this place, however, one wouldn’t know what the rest of the world looks like. Before they meet the first people, Dean and Cas wander between fields of corn and trees bearing fruit. They are still smaller than what he used to know, the corn is shorter and the grass not as green, but compared to everything else, this is paradise. There are cows on the fields – not fat, but not thin either.

Somewhere, there probably are horses as well.

People are working in the fields that sometimes have the leftovers of buildings sticking out as if to remind them what would happen if they ever lost heaven’s favour. The moment the two wanderers were spotted, Dean learns later, everyone was alarmed and once they were identified, those who happened to be nearby came to welcome them.

Fortunately, Cas has told Dean everything he needs to know about these people and their closed-off little world, or he would have given them away with stupid questions about things the messenger of Michael is supposed to know. For example, Dean would have asked what these men and women do when other visitors happen to come this way; those not belonging the favoured of heaven.

They have little contact with the outside world, but they know compared to everyone else they are blessed. They aren’t going to risk losing that blessing by letting the less pure and faithful walk among them.

Dean doesn’t like them. No matter how much Cas tried to explain their behaviour, he doesn’t like them at all.

The thought of what they will do to them if they find out what they are really up to doesn’t help as well. Or the thought of what maybe they did to Cas, once.

Of course, it weren’t these people who betrayed them so long ago. It was their ancestors, none of which have been alive for generations. Dean still projects his opinion of them onto the entire group. Somehow, he doesn’t think they have changed all that much in the last century or two.

The biggest irony, however, is that they don’t even recognize Castiel. Among those they first meet, no one even knows his name, lest what history they share. The fallen angel never would have needed to step back and leave the focus on Dean, who doesn’t like it.

Everyone is friendly to Cas, despite the fact the that they believe him to be the vessel of a traitor. They treat him with mild interest and a casual gentleness that reminds Dean of the way people used to treat other people’s pets. Dean they all but carry on their shoulders. They probably would have, if only they had the courage to touch him, or generally breathe in his presence.

It’s not just respect, Dean realises after a while. There’s a healthy portion of fear as well – they know their alliance with the angels is more than fragile and depending on their benefactors’ whim. They are scared what might happen if they manage to displease them.

Quite right, too. Dean ignores them, doesn’t like them enough to offer a warning or a word of false assurance. He sometimes thinks that they must be putting on a mask as much as Dean and Cas are, really just waiting for the right moment to hand them over to whatever enemy pays best because the angels long since warned them about the two, but even if they are, there’s nothing Dean could do about it. So he just plays his part and hopes they’ll be gone from here before nightfall.

The leader of the place nearly falls over himself in his hurry to greet Dean as their little procession reaches the village. He is – and what else could he be? – a prophet, which doesn’t sit well with Dean at all. Prophets know things.

This one, however, doesn’t seem to know even where his own feet are.

“Dean Winchester!” he greets, completely ignoring Castiel as he all but falls to his knees. “We have been informed of your coming only this morning, but of course the best rooms are available to you if you want to rest. Me and my family are happy to leave you our home for the duration of your stay. Our women are preparing a banquet right now. Forgive us – had we know of your plans to visit us any sooner, all would have been ready, of course, as it always was.”

“That’ll be alright,” Dean hurries to say. “We did not mean to surprise you, but found ourselves without transportation pretty unexpectedly. We’ll only take the horses and be on our way.” He tries not to show how freaked out he is right this moment.

The prophet – no one told them his name and Dean doesn’t ask in case he is supposed to know – looks at the same times crestfallen and vaguely relieved. “You will leave in the morning, then?”

“Yes,” Castiel says suddenly, making everyone look somewhat uncomfortable since they have so far been happy to pretend he doesn’t exist. “We are very tired and will go to sleep right after dinner.”

Dean forces a laugh. “I wish that was true. But we have no time to linger. We need to be in Chicago as soon as possible and unfortunately have to decline your generous offer.”

“Our time is not quite that pressing, and we will be able to make better time if well fed and well rested,” Castiel points out, still looking at the prophet.

“You must excuse _Jimmy_ here,” Dean says with a grin that’s more a baring of teeth. “Housing an evil angel has rattled his mind and he sometimes forgets that it’s not actually him who makes the decisions here.”

Mr. Prophet is eager to offer his help with that. “If you want us to-”

“No need,” Dean interrupts him hurriedly before the man can say something that will make Dean hate this place even more than he already does. “Just give us the da… the horses, so we can move on. Michael needs our help now. And yours,” he adds, much to the delight of the men standing around them.

Naturally, the horses have to be prepared as well. Fortunately, Dean manages to make everyone leave them alone for the wait, even though most linger nearby, standing by in case their guests have demands and out of curiosity. Dean and Cas sit on a stone bench beside the house of the prophet and watch life trying and failing to go on around them as if nothing special happened.

The village looks just like that: a village rather than a camp built of leftovers. The houses look like they were built independently, not integrated into the ruins. In fact, only one side of the place borders on the ruins of the city, the rest is fields and meadows.

It doesn’t feel right, it’s too open. For anyone else, this place would be doomed.

Collaborating with the destroyers of mankind apparently is the way to go.

All streets are plastered. Flowers are growing between the cracks. Somewhere, a child is laughing and calling for someone in its high-pitched voice before being hushed into silence.

Dean lets his gaze wander over the people nearby who pretend not to be watching them about as successfully as Jena’s friends did back in the day. He wonders if there are any angels among them, since it’s obvious this place isn’t warded against them. He’s almost willing to bet on it.

“Not many women around, huh?” he whispers to Cas, noticing for the first time that they have met only men on the fields and streets. The only women Dean has seen since coming here were watching them from the windows of their houses.

It isn’t really what he wanted to say.

Cas only shrugs. “Maybe they think this is what the book tells them.”

“How did they know we were coming?” Dean moves on to the more important topic. “The prophet saw us? Then they know-”

“The prophets of this place never had visions of the future. They are merely… receptacles of angelic messages. They know what the angels want them to know.”

“What?” Dean hisses. “Then the angels…”

“Have been watching us all the time. Possibly, yes. It would seem so.” Even Cas, despite his calm voice, seems troubled by the prospect.

Knowing they will be left alone until Cas lead them to his friend’s soul (or Dean learns where it is hidden) doeasn’t do anything to make Dean feel better about it.

“Clumsy to give themselves away like this, though,” the fallen angel adds. “These people would have helped us anyway.”

“Either way, we need to leave as soon as possible.”

“It doesn’t matter. If they found us, one night more or less will make no difference – we will stay in their focus anyway. There is no reason for us not to rest for a night. Another chance like this will not present itself for a long time. Possibly never.”

“I don’t care. I don’t like this place, and I don’t like these people. I don’t want to stay here any longer than I absolutely have to.”

“Don’t make such a decision without asking me first,” Castiel scolds him, like an irritated parent. “You’re judging the situation too emotionally.”

“I am making the decision because you have forced me into the position to make all our decisions and deal with all this bullshit. So you can fucking deal with _this_!”

Castiel has this blank look on his face again and Dean becomes aware that they are getting too loud and are too obviously fighting. He sits up straight, sends a strained smile in the direction of the men no longer even pretending not to stare and hopes they can get away from here before those guys try to be helpful again.

 

-

 

Dean gets his will in the end. Of course he does – he’s the boss! At least until they are out of the village again. Which fortunately is soon.

The villagers offer to have an armed group accompany them; no doubt a great sacrifice, as they don’t appear to get out much. Dean can’t imagine they are really as disappointed as they seem when he declines and claims heavenly top-secrecy as a reason. He very nearly jokes about “Jimmy” being such bad company that he couldn’t subject any other unsuspecting victim to it, but remembers in time that that might lead to Cas unexpectedly being executed on the ground of being a nuisance to The Vessel.

They get away while they’re both still alive, on horseback, with Dean clinging to the saddle while at the same time trying to look cool. He’s actually pretty exited about the horses now, and wishes he had a cowboy hat.

And a poncho.

At least they have food. And clothes. Maybe there’s even something poncho-like among those – Dean will have to check as soon as they take a break.

They don’t take a break for a long time. Their horses are strong and they ride slowly, preserving their strength. When they finally stop for food and sleep, it’s well past nightfall.

In the morning Dean is sore and stiff and hates the idea of ever getting back in the saddle again.

 

-

 

The way to Milwaukee is long. Dean quickly loses track of the days that pass. A lot of them are unbearably boring. Others… aren’t.

They run into demons five times. Four times they see them in time and are able to avoid them. One of the groups seems to be looking for something and Dean is pretty sure it’s them. Since Lucifer and Michael currently share the same goal – find the soul – and neither of them would profit from killing either him or Castiel before it is found, Dean doesn’t think those demons are Lucifer’s minions and nearly jumps out, demanding to be taken to their leader. The memory of what Cas told him of the consequences keeps him quiet and hidden, though. He’s willing to give Cas’ plan a chance, or at least learn more about it before he acts on his own. At the very least he would like to have something to bargain with before he sells himself to the nearest demon that will have him.

The other time they meet a demon the demon poses as a normal human who just happened to run into them. Dean might have bought the act, but the demon made the plan without knowing about Cas’ built-in demon sensor. The former angel goes with it, lets the seemingly hapless and confused woman get close and then sticks his sword between her ribs. Dean, who didn’t know about anything, is shocked for a moment.

Then there is the one time they actually meet two humans who are just humans. Their paths cross in a dry, dusty canyon. The other two are travelling somewhere as well. There was a settlement in Topeka, they heard, and they hoped they’d find it and be taken in. Their own settlement, small to begin with, had just been all but wiped out by an epidemic, and the people from the only other one nearby threatened to kill them if they dared to get too close, were too afraid of the disease even though the two refugees showed no signs of carrying it.

Cas tries to discourage them from their plan, tells them to stay away from any communities for another few weeks until they can be sure neither of them will get sick. The two strangers, in turn, try to steal their horses. They don’t part in friendship.

The landscape changes. Dirt and dust dominate everything, everywhere, but the further they get from the cities that were at the immediate centre of destruction the more vegetation is to be found. They never run a risk of running out of water, follow rivers and pass lakes, some better filled, some less. Some even have fish, and Dean never suspected that he liked the slimy things so much.

They come across canyons and forests. Sometimes Dean thinks he can identify where they are, but he’s never sure. Once they stray from the old roads, the world isn’t familiar anymore. He might have travelled every state a hundred times, but he never went anywhere his car couldn’t take him.

There’s always enough for the horses to feed on. The food Dean and Cas were given lasts for weeks, and when they run out, it is easy to hunt or find fruits and berries. Cas takes the time to teach Dean how to set traps and Dean finds that he actually already knows how. When he contributes his first medium-sized rabbit to their food plan, he feels ridiculously proud, a like a little boy eagerly awaiting his father’s approval.

Cas does little more than acknowledge his success. His rabbit is fatter, anyway.

It’s not perfect. The world doesn’t seem whole anywhere they go, the grass is never green enough, the trees never too tall or entirely healthy.  Plants, even after centuries of adjustment, grow only so well with so little sun. Yet, one evening, when they are resting at the edge of a valley, with the horses nibbling at the grass and the invisible sun making the sky glow in a deep red behind streaks of dark clouds, Dean has to admit that there is a certain beauty, even to this world.

The ruins of a far town they see as outlines before the dimly glowing sky only add to the impression.

It seems odd that there is no one living here, that all that’s left of humanity is concentrated to the ruins that don’t have much left to offer them. Dean understands, though – the cities offer protection the open areas don’t.

Whenever they near a city, things get worse again, as if to underline that the attack was meant for mankind, not the world. (It wasn’t. It was meant as a message from one brother to the other.) But they only get near the cities when they have to – when it would be too much of a detour to avoid them or the area is so rough they have to keep to the roads.

Apart from the two who tried to steal their horses, they never meet another human being, all the way to a city that is, most certainly, not Milwaukee.

Dean figures it out soon enough – even without being able to give their exact longitude and shit he knows that they are passing Milwaukee by at least a hundred miles to the west. The realisation comes with a new rush of anger. He wonders if this is Castiel’s way of punishing him for his refusal to worship his brother’s name all those weeks ago: instant removal of trust. “Milwaukee my ass,” he mutters through clenched teeth, but Cas is riding a few dozen feet ahead of him and doesn’t hear.

Dean never brings it up and Cas never explains. They never talk about it, but the seething anger and hurt in Dean runs a little deeper by the time they near their actual destination. That, and he conviction that he might be better off on his own.

He can’t trust anyone.

The town Cas finally aims for has never been large, which must be the reason why it’s still mostly intact. At least it looks quite intact from afar. As they get closer, Dean can see that many buildings were left standing but are hollowed out, as if something ate them from the inside.

They ride past a sign that has been worn away by weather and time. Only the word _Blue_ is still readable, but Dean’s mind completes the name automatically and almost without his notice. They’re in Minnesota, then. Not quite Milwaukee, but going in the right direction long enough for Dean to need a long time before he noticed the difference.

Cas is an asshole and should die in a fire. Dean still catches himself looking for explanations for his friend, making excuses, trying to see things from Cas’ point of view, simply because Cas is the only one he has.

But Cas doesn’t offer anything, and Dean is fed up with all the lies and mistrust. The fallen angel isn’t the only one who has reason for doubt.

Dean feels used. With Michael and even Lucifer, he at least knew what for.

Which doesn’t mean he has any desire to return to Michael or any other angel (or whatever) he has met along the way. Which is exactly his present dilemma: he can’t trust anyone, but on his own he’ll be lost.

But then, it might be better to go out alone and learn things on his own than depend on the very subjective truths he’s being told by all those who pretend to mean well. By now, he feels confident enough to survive on his own and if he doesn’t…

Well, it’s not like a painful death would be undeserved, after everything he has done.

(Most of all, he just wishes Sam was there. Nothing was ever okay when he wasn’t.)

Night is falling when they enter Blue Earth, but even in the growing darkness, Dean can tell that the town is all but empty. He hears distant voices, sees the light of fires reflected in the low clouds. The streets are well maintained and some of the houses they pass, though currently empty, show signs of recent use. Whoever is here doesn’t bother to hide their presence. Dean wonders if Cas is leading them to a demon’s nest after all.

He does ask, eventually, to wake him up if nothing else – Cas has been silent for so long Dean is beginning to think he fell asleep riding, or died in the saddle. Probably of sores.

Turns out he’s awake, and once again knowing everything there is to know about their current location. Walking the earth for centuries, or however long he did before he was human, does have its perks.

Castiel isn’t very communicative, though, and keeps his explanation simple: A hunter used to live in this town, but while he was a victim of the war, he was killed years before the war actually started. Later, when things started to go bad, some people simply happened to find his secret arsenal and his personal notes on the things that were out to kill them, and so those lucky ones settled in his old place. More and more people joined them as time passed.

Apart from this one there are very few camps up here and nothing of interest to find. Just a few well armed people living their lives. Demons rarely stray this far North.

“Have I been here before?” Dean asks. That’s not really the question, though – he knows he was. He’s merely hoping for details.

“Yes.”

“That’s it?” Dean scowls when nothing else is offered. “Why did I come? What was I doing here?”

“I’m sorry.” Castiel doesn’t sound sorry at all. He sounds sour. “Giving you information on your old life is nearly impossible without mentioning Sam. You will have to remain ignorant of your past, I’m afraid – I’m sure that’s in your best interest, though.”

“You’re being childish,” Dean snaps. “You know that, Cas? You’re five!”

“We’re being followed.”

“I know. Have known for ages. Bastards are probably after our horses.”

“It’s possible.” Cas doesn’t seem to be too concerned. He’s been doing well without a horse for a long time, Dean thinks – could probably care less, depending on how much further they have to go once they got what they want in this place.

Or rather, once Cas got what he wants.

Dean just hopes whoever will steal the animals in the end won’t bother to kill them for it.

At least they can be sure there are still people here. On their way to Minnesota, they only once got close to a settlement Cas knew from a long time ago. It was a coincidence and they never intended to stop there, but Cas noticed that the wards that surrounded it in a wide circle had been destroyed, and when they checked they found nothing. The camp had been gone for so long its remains looked hardly better than the ruins it had been nestled in. A handful of bleached bones in one of the houses refused to tell their story.

There are no bones here, no destruction – at least no recent destruction. The town looks almost as good as the one in Tallahassee, and event though they don’t see anyone, the well maintained streets tell Dean that someone lives here, and intends to stay.

The thought that they might be leading angels or demons to this place comes unbidden and doesn’t leave Dean alone anymore. Almost involuntarily he looks back over his shoulder, but the only thing following them up the street is the dark of night.

“You know where we’re going?” he asks Cas.

“Yes.”

“You said so in Tallahassee as well.”

“No, you simply assumed I knew the way.”

“And this time you do know it? How long since you last came here?”

“Long. I killed Sam about a week from here.”

The words send… something down Dean’s spine. Maybe a jolt of energy, or the shock of a punch to the stomach. Something painful. He doesn’t have time to react, however. Castiel simply keeps talking. “After that I came close, but didn’t come here. I was too interesting a target at that time.”

Which could mean that he didn’t want to endanger the people here, or that he didn’t trust them. Probably both. If this world makes you chose between two crappy options, ‘Both’ is the most likely answer.

“So, even if you remember the right way, it’s very possible that they moved whatever you’re looking for by now.”

“Possible, but unlikely. Even if they did, we can always ask.”

He does have a point there. Dean can only hope the information won’t cost them the clothes they’re wearing.

“You think whoever you’re hoping to meet is just going to give you what you want? What if they want something in return?”

“Then we give them the horses.”

“Speak for yourself,” Dean mutters. He’d actually like to keep the horse for the moment he takes off.

Though maybe it won’t be that bad if Cas is horseless at that time.

“Got our own horses,” A voice suddenly cuts through the growing darkness. Both Dean and Cas pull their horses to a stop and turn to the left. Dean instinctively reaches for his gun, but the guy stepping out of the shadows between two houses looks harmless enough. He carries no weapon Dean can see, but that doesn’t say anything.

The woman at his side has a gun in a leg holster. She doesn’t draw it, though.

“’sides, our horses look better,” the man continues. “Where did you come from? You look like you’ve been riding all the way from Texas.”

“We rode here all the way from Florida,” Dean corrects him.

The woman whistles through her teeth, even as Cas nitpicks and explains that they didn’t get the horses until Alabama.

“What brings you this far North?” The man seems entirely unconcerned with the new arrivals. There is a lightness to his stance, a lack of tension to his movement that Dean doesn’t trust for a second. Right this moment, at least a dozen men hidden in the shadows are aiming their weapons at them, of that he’s sure.

“A woman called Ennina Miller used to live here,” Cas explains. The others frown a little, though Dean’s not sure if he imagined the slight change in the way they hold themselves.

Once again he has no idea where this is going or who Cas is talking about. To be fair, though, he never asked – partially due to being too busy fuming over how Cas never tells him anything.

“She lived here alright,” the woman says. “T’ was long before I was born. She must’ve been dead for… what, a century now? More?”

“I hope you didn’t plan to meet her.” The man sounds amused. “Else you’re in for a disappointment.”

“If you’re looking for a psychic, I hear Missouri Mosley in Kansas might still be around,” the woman adds, which gets a laugh out of her companion. Well, it’s nice to know that at last _someone_ is having fun on this planet.

From the line between Castiel’s brows, Dean wouldn’t bet on him getting that they are being made fun of. “Mosley died of illness in 2011. And I am well aware that Miller is not alive today either. Regardless of this inconvenience, I harbour the hope that you will allow me insight in her notes.”

The two strangers share a long look while Dean, on his horse, rolls his eyes. Since he knows Castiel is able to speak like a normal person if he wants to, he suspect that he might actually have done that on purpose.

Still. So not the way to blend with the rest of the population, especially considering that most of them can’t even read or write these days.

“What would you want with them?” the woman asks.

“Read them seems to be the obvious answer,” Dean drops in.

Castiel adds, “She knew things.”

“That she did,” the man agrees, nodding slowly. “What d’ you wanna know? Must be damn important if you came here all the way from Florida.” Suddenly, a grin breaks out on his face. “Well, whatever it is, it’ll have to wait for morning. I bet you’re pretty tired, and ‘sides, our Madam don’t wanna be bothered after sunset anyway.”

“After long before sunset, actually,” the woman adds.

“And not until long after sunrise either.”

“Who’s this Madam?” Cas wants to know.

“The woman who’s in charge of everything. She’ll probably let you have the notes, though.”

So that’s the woman who’ll take their horses, and probably their clothes too, and the nice bow Cas has shot them so many rabbits with. At least she has a name.

Well, kind of.

“What makes you so sure?” Dean asks, finding these people and their behaviour stranger by the second.

“Because she told us you were coming,” the man explains, as if that were the most natural thing in the world. “And she didn’t tell us to kill you on the spot.”

 

-

 

Whoever ‘she’ is apparently also didn’t tell Taula and Milon who their guests are. At least no one says anything when Dean introduces Cas as Clark and himself as Bruce. No one gives them a second name or asks for theirs, so Dean supposes that family names are either not of import here or have been lost completely.

It seems an odd thing to notice.

Contrary to his expectations, they aren’t asked to pay for their stay, the room they are given or the dinner they are served. Taula and Milon share a house with five others, three of them children or teenagers, and by the look of it Dean and Cas arrived just in time for dinner. They are the main attraction for the small group – understandable, considering hardly anyone ever comes here. The oldest kid has vague memories of the last visitor they had, the two younger ones have never seen anyone but the barely two hundred men and women living here.

Dean takes over the entertainment of their hosts, telling of their travels, with emphasis on the two wanderers who wanted to steal their horses and the demons they avoided. He describes the cities he saw in great detail and even tells of the green, dead forest while being careful not to mention anything that might give away Castiel’s nature or his own background as an angel’s meat suit.

All the time, Cas sits beside him hardly saying a word. He leaves the storytelling to Dean, which is a wise decision considering that he’s not the greatest teller of all times and especially considering that whenever he does bother to tell anything, it tends to end up ruining the mood.

Everyone here is so carefree it makes Dean nervous, and when one of the older inhabitants of the house throws them a suspicious gaze or two over dinner, he feels almost relieved. He still has a hard time sleeping that night, only relaxing enough on the wonderful, wonderful mattress made of straw because Cas is awake and would notice any danger that might be sneaking up the stairs to their room.

Hours later, Dean wakes up in the dark and Cas is lying on his own bed, deeply asleep. So much for the watchdog. On the one hand, Dean trusts Cas’ instincts and experience enough to know that he wouldn’t sleep if he wasn’t sure the place was save, on the other hand he can’t shake off his own inherent caution and ends up lying awake for the rest of the night, listening to every sound.

At dawn, he gives up on sleep and rolls out of bed, pulling on his jacket quietly so he doesn’t wake Cas, and sneaks down the stairs to the living area. He finds Ruth sitting on the old couch that is moth eaten but covered in a large, handmade woollen blanket to hide its faults. The young girl looks at him through wide eyes full of awe.

“Can’t you sleep?” she asks. Her knees are drawn up to her chest and her arms wrapped around her legs for warmth. Despite the chill, she isn’t wearing anything but a sleeveless dress that does nothing to hide her skinny limbs. It seems to be just her, though – most of the others are well fed. Perhaps she’s simply the skinny type.

“What about you?” he asks back. Sits on the armrest of the couch and listens to the silence. Everyone else is still asleep.

“Couldn’t.” Her eyes are large and dark as she looks at him. Dean finds it hard to guess her age – she could be twelve or fifteen, probably not older. “Where did you sleep when you were travelling?” she asks. “Did you sleep on the horse?”

Dean laughs quietly. “No, we slept on the ground. One of us always kept watch, the other one slept.”

“Where did the horses sleep?”

“Right beside us. Which was nice – horses are warm.”

Ruth nods. “I’d like a horse now,” she tells him and wraps her arms even closer around herself.

Dean is quite happy that of all the things he lost along the way, he got to keep his leather jacket. “I bet. But you do have horses around here, right?”

“Of course.” She scrunches her face as if the idea of there being no horses was absurd. “Almost as many horses as people. I have my own, you know? It’s called Benny.”

“Is it?” Dean smiles.

“Yeah. I got him when I turned ten. Taula makes me take care of him every day after school. It’s annoying sometimes, but, you know.” She shrugs, but Dean is more interested in the other thing she said. So they do have a school here. He’s not really surprised.

“I wish I could take Benny for a long trip,” Ruth tells him. “Like you did. I want to see the rest of the world, but we’re not allowed to get further than a few miles from the town, and never alone.”

“You’re not missing much,” Dean comforts her. “Really. The world really is nothing worth seeing. Actually, compared to every other place I’ve seen, this one is the best so far.”

“I guess it’s okay,” Ruth admits, though she does seem disappointed. Then her face lights up. “Did you know that a hunter used to live here? In the church where our Madam is living now. He was a priest and he killed demons.”

She seems to think that a hunter is a pretty big deal, so Dean indulges her. “Really? Ca… Clark told me about the hunter, but I didn’t know he was a priest as well.”

“Well, he was. And you know what else?” She leans closer and drops her voice even more, as if what she’s about to reveal is a great secret. “Dean Winchester used to come here sometimes.”

Dean nearly falls off the armrest. He doesn’t, but he kind of freezes. “Did he?” he manages.

“Oh yeah. Wait, I’ll show you a picture.”

“Wait, that’s really not…” It’s too late – she’s already gone. Before Dean can figure out what to do now or come up with a good plan about what to do if she recognizes him, she’s back already, shoving a picture frame in his face.

The photo inside is old – of course it is. It’s faded, but apparently has been kept in a box away from damaging sunlight as the picture is still clearly recognizable.

It shows a blonde little boy of maybe six or seven years who carries a much smaller child in his arms. The little one has one hand fisted in the older one’s hair and is trying to reach for something not in the picture, while the older one holds on to the squirming little body with an annoyed expression on his face.

Dean swallows, even as he automatically takes the picture. Ruth is leaning over the back of the couch, her hair hanging onto Dean’s shoulder and brushing his cheek, while his fingers brush over the dark locks of the little boy in the picture.

“It’s the other one,” Ruth corrects him. “The little one must be his brother, I guess.”

Funny that she seems to think only Dean is worth mentioning. “What do you know about his brother?”

Ruth shrugs as if it’s really not important. “He died.”

“Yeah, I guess he did,” Dean mutters. “Funny, though. That even someone like Dean used to be a child once, and had a kid brother he cared about.”

“I suppose,” Ruth says. “Doesn’t matter, though, does it? He destroyed the world. I doubt anything else in his life can top that.”

“So do I,” Dean agrees, quietly, his eyes still tracing the lines of the picture in his hands.

 

-

 

Just after sunrise, it begins to rain.

Heavy drops fall from a sky that is barely darker than on any day before. They splatter on the ground, leaving dark traces in the dust, only visible for a moment before the whole ground is covered in water. Castiel and the others stand in the open doorway, under the roof, and watch, while Dean steps out into the rain a minute after it started, tilts his face toward the sky and allows the water to soak him through. He even left his jacket inside.

Little Thomas tries to do the same, but after one step away from the protection of the roof he ducks his head and runs back under the cover. After that, he only holds his hand into the rain and watches fascinated as it runs over his skin and drops off his fingers.

It’s only then that Dean realises that the boy has probably never seen the rain fall in his life.

As quickly as the rain came, it’s over. Altogether it can’t have lasted for more than five minutes. When it is over, Dean is standing in water almost up to his ankles, the dry earth unable to take it in this quickly, or at all.

Everyone is silent afterwards. Dean can see wonder and amazement in the eyes of the younger ones; the adults are harder to read, perhaps wondering what this might mean, or worried about their crops that have adapted to an environment with very little water.

At least the next hillside is far enough away that landslides are not an immediate risk.

Dean is shivering a little when he gets back inside. It’s still chilly, and now he’s soaked on top of it, yet he can’t bring himself to regret having run outside.

Perhaps this was the last rainfall of his life. It sure doesn’t seem to happen often.

“Once in a few years,” Ruth tells him when he asks. Her voice is quiet, as if scared of disturbing the silence that has fallen over the place. “The last one was… I don’t know. Tom was just a little kid, I bet he doesn’t even remember. I’ve seen a few, but they were never… never like this.”

Dean wonders if that means something. He’s glad they are not in the village of fanatical angel worshippers anymore – certainly, those would have seen this as a sign from God to take Dean and Cas and drown them in a puddle of mud.

“The wells will have filled up some,” Cas says, suddenly, too loud, as if he had to justify the rain to these people. A second later, Milon appears in the door, his hair wet like Dean’s.

“The Madam will see you now,” he says.

 

-

 

The Madam is living in the church. Dean is not exactly surprised – this is where the hunter who used to live here had his arsenal, after all. According to Cas, this is where Ennina Miller lived as well. Dean looks at the building and finds no echo of memories inside him, even though he must have been here before, as a child.

The church is in good condition, but then the whole town is. On the way there, Dean sees a couple of other people, staring curiously at them from the windows and doorways. They make no effort to hide their presence.

His shoes are soaked in muddy water. He’s forgotten how much he missed the rain until it fell down on him, but he’s also forgotten that walking through streets that are basically very shallow, dirty rivers is not awesome.

It’s cold. The sky is not much darker than normally, but it _is_ darker, and there is a tension in the air; a kind of pressure that reminds Dean of the air just before a thunderstorm. There is no thunder, though. No distant flicker on the horizon. No wind. There’s nothing.

Inside, the church has obviously gone through some changes since it was used as a house of worship. The hall behind the large, strong doors, where Dean expected lines of wooden benches, is filled with furniture of the more comfortable kind. There are couches and coffee tables, the floor is covered with rugs. At the far end there is a fireplace that has obviously been added long after the building has been erected. A piano is standing near it, and on holders in various corners of the room Dean can see other kinds of instruments. Flutes and violins and however these large harp-things are called.

They are probably all priceless now. Whoever built them stopped the production a long time ago.

Dean wonders if they are still being used. It looks like it, and oddly enough, there is some comfort in that observation.

The walls are lined with shelves that contain not only, but mostly books. Altogether, the inside of the church looks like someone’s living room more than anything else.

And it’s empty. No old lady in a long gown with glitter and too heavy make up is waiting for them, nor is an old lady with a dark scarf wrapped around her head, doing her best to imitate an Evil Emperor she probably never heard of. There’s just the room, and Dean, Cas and Milon dropping mud onto the carpet.

“Well? Where is she?” Dean asks.

“In the back. That’s her chamber. She’s waiting for you.” Milon points to the other end of the room, and now Dean can make out the small door half hidden behind a curtain hanging from the high ceiling.

Their guide stays behind when Dean and Cas make for the door. “I’m not invited,” he says when Dean asks about it.

Behind the door a long, narrow staircase leads down into a basement. Dean and Cas share a look, and Dean’s fingers slide beneath his jacket to wrap around the hilt of his dagger. He’s a little surprised they were allowed to keep their weapons, anyway – and about how trusting everyone here seems to be. It kind of makes him expect, when he pushes open the door, to find Darth Vader waiting at the end of a long table.

Instead there is a young woman sitting on something that looks suspiciously like a throne. She’s sitting with one leg draped over the armrest, dangling a bare foot that is a lot cleaner than the last time Dean saw her.

Dean draws his knife anyway, out of surprise and because he knows she’s not only dangerous, but also completely batshit insane.

“Hey, Mickey!” Jena greets him with a grin. “Took you long enough to get here. I was beginning to get bored.”

 


	8. Chapter 8

There are a lot of things Dean could say now. There are a lot of things he _would_ have said, had he managed to sort out his thoughts before Castiel beat him to it.

“It’s you,” he says harshly. “I recognize you.”

“Must say, I’m surprised,” Jena replies, her attention shifting from Dean to Cas and her smirk growing. “You’re pretty far gone these days. I’m surprised you can tell an angel from a brick stone.”

“I can tell it’s you, even now,” Castiel hisses, the same moment Dean asks, “Wait, she’s an angel?”

“Hi.” Jena grins at Dean, not a care in the world, despite the fact that...

…Castiel’s sword is still sheathed and he seems to have no intention of drawing it. Dean is confused. Cas’ entire demeanour says he doesn’t like Jena very much, yet he seems to have no desire to fight her. And he doesn’t see her as a threat either. By now, Dean can read his companion well enough to tell.

“She is that,” Castiel confirms, and Dean feels anger welling up through the confusion once again.

“Then why did you say you didn’t know her?”

Cas frowns at him, clearly not getting why Dean is pissed at him this time.

“When I told you about her?” Dean helps his memory. “Jena, the homicidal chick? You said you didn’t know her.”

“This is Jena?” Cas narrows his eyes, staring at her suspiciously. “It’s not her real name. When I met her, she was wearing a different vessel. Male. She certainly used a different name, too.”

“Thought I’d give Dean here a proper welcome,” Jena, or however she might be called, jumps in. “Help him a little on the way, you know.”

“You didn’t help at all,” Dean snaps. “You made everyone think I’m a murderer.”

“Well, you are.” Jena brushes the protest away.

Dean can’t even deny it.

“So, what’s your real name?” he asks.

“Jena will do for now,” she says generously. Dean rolls his eyes.

“What do you want this time?” he asks. “Blow up this town so the demons will find us?”

“The demons are the least of your worries. I wouldn’t bother with them. And no – actually, I was just bored.”

“I bet.”

“And since I’m bored, I thought I might help you a little.”

“We can’t trust you,” Cas points out. For once, Dean is with him all the way.

Jena pouts at him. “You hurt me,” she says. “I helped you before, remember? You’d be dead without me. As would Sam.”

“Sam _is_ dead,” Cas snaps, but Jena merely snorts.

“Semantics. You know what I mean.”

Cas obviously does, because he lets it go. “How would you help us?” he asks carefully.

“Well, I could tell you why your plan is stupid,” Jena offers. “If you’re still interested afterwards, I could give you more info on purgatory and how to find it. That’s what you came for, isn’t it?”

“How do you know that?” Dean wants to know. He doesn’t like this in the least.

“Oh, it’s not that hard to guess. After all, Cas here has toyed with the plan for a long time. He’s been researching where he could, and I deduced my conclusions.”

She’s different. It makes Dean nervous just how much. The Jena he knew months ago had the same face, but all the mannerisms have changed. Somehow, it makes her seem even more unsettling than before.

“I wouldn’t trust her as far as I can throw her,” he warns Castiel, causing Jena to pout at him in a way that does remind him of the crazy girl he met before after all.

“Oh, come on,” she complains. “What have I done to deserve that? I got you horses, after all. How about some gratitude?”

“You didn’t get us anything,” Dean snaps back. “We got the horses from some religious fanatics who thought I was sent by Michael.”

“Fanatics who knew you were coming,” Jena reminds him.

“Yeah, because someone had a prophetic vision sent by an angel. So unless you’re…” Dean stops and looks at Jena the angel. She grins at him.

“Why did you do that?” Cas asks. “You told them of our coming just so they would give us horses?” He seems suspicious as well, and Dean gets what he’s thinking about: This might all be Michael’s doing.

“Of course. You’d have needed ages to come here otherwise. Took you long enough even if you didn’t have to walk all the way.”

“Why did you want us to come here? You could have come to _us_.” Dean looks around, suddenly very nervous. They are in a basement, only one exit. A perfect place for a trap – and they walked into it willingly.

“I could have – but that would have been too easy, wouldn’t it? I’m not in a hurry, and Cas wanted to come here anyway. That lady who lived in this town was the only psychic who ever saw anything of purgatory. Thought I’d meet you here and spare you the disappointment.”

“The disappointment of not meeting you here?” Dean asks incredulously. Jena grimaces and gets off her throne. Dean takes a step back, but she’s suddenly right in his face.

“This place seems to make you nervous,” she says. “Let’s go somewhere else.”

Her small, narrow hand touches Dean’s forehead and the next second he’s outside. Outside on the road that is wet from rain. He can see the town of Blue Earth in the distance.

Castiel and Jena are right beside him.

“Was that supposed to impress me?” Dean asks. “What’s this supposed to be when it’s done?”

“This is me, proving a point,” Jena snaps, for the first time displaying irritation. “You’ll see what it’s about when the time comes, so shut up and listen!”

Dean shuts up, surprised by the sudden outburst. Beside him, Castiel is still busy turning around himself as if he doesn’t recognize where they are.

“You!” Jena says, pulling his attention back to her. “You’re entirely out of juice, you poor, pitiful creature. And yet you want to go and break open the door to purgatory? Take in all those souls, power yourself up to a level equal with dad? Do you even realise how idiotic that plan is? You’d burn up in seconds. It wouldn’t get anything out of Lucy but a snicker. And I’d be right with him, because idiocy has to be punished.”

“It won’t happen that way,” Cas defends his plan. “I would go slowly. The first souls would restore my status as an angel. Only once I am able to handle the flow will I take in the rest.”

Dean listens up at that.

“And you really think it’ll be that easy?” Jena snaps. “Do you think purgatory comes in little bites? It’s going to kill you. And that’s it. The great plan of defeating Lucifer ends with the hero killing himself and sparing Satan the trouble. The only good thing that will come out of it is that with you gone, they can’t torture you for info on Sam’s soul anymore. Because it’ll burn you up so completely there’ll be nothing left of you to resurrect.”

Cas remains unfazed. “In that case, it’ll be not entirely without benefit.”

“Or so you believe. You know as well as I do that it’s only a matter of time before they find that soul. You’ve hidden it well, but it can hardly run, right? And with you gone, there’ll be no one to protect it.”

Dean doesn’t care about the soul, so he has no reason to feel insulted here. It’s true, anyway. He couldn’t protect anyone.

“What about you?” he asks. “You’re an angel, right? Why don’t you power up on damned souls and save the world from the devil?”

“Because I don’t give a rat’s ass about the world,” Jena snarls, suddenly angry. “It used to be fun, but now it’s about as interesting as a pebble. And the devil is still my brother. I know you’re the last person who’d understand this, but not everyone is eager to strike down their own family.”

“No, you’re all too willing to let someone else do the dirty work for you!”

With a shrug, Jena turns away. Her mood swings don’t seem to have disappeared completely, after all. “It’s only fair to give you a chance. I don’t think you actually _have_ a chance, but this place will become even more boring after the final battle. You might be able to draw out the end a little. Keep me entertained.”

“Hardly convincing.”

“And who exactly cares if you believe me? I’m here and helping you. You don’t have so many supporters that you can afford to be picky.”

“Except you’re not actually helping anyone. So far you’ve only let us come a long way and stand around in the open.”

“Excuse me? Last time I checked you were coming here anyway.”

“Yeah, to get some journals or whatever it is Cas was after. I bet we would have gotten a lot more out of it if we’d just found them and left again.”

Jena snorts in an entirely not amused way and turns away to include Cas into her next words. Only when he doesn’t have to bear her whole attention anymore does Dean realise how tense he is, how ready to bolt. Damn, but that woman is freaking him out.

“I’m better than a notebook. A notebook wouldn’t warn you. But Miller’s notes are in the church if you still want them. I’ll hand them to you later.”

“Would’ve been convenient if you’d remembered that while we were still _in_ the church,” Dean mutters. But Jena’s attention is entirely on Cas now, who begins to look uncomfortable.

“You know why I won’t step up and take care of my brothers myself? Power up on purgatory and put an end to this mess? Because the moment the door opens, every creature of heaven and hell would be on my ass. Even if I got the power, won and even survived, it would mean walking away from who I was forever.”

“I fell willingly,” Cas reminds her calmly. Jena grimaces at that, but for the first time something soft is reflected in her expression.

“I know,” she says. “It wasn’t worth it.”

 

-

 

As it turns out, Jena knows a lot about purgatory, even though she keeps assuring them that she doesn’t have any interest in it herself. Dean finds that odd, because Cas, who used to be just as much angel as she is, didn’t know much about it beyond that fact that it exists, or so he said.

Odd and suspicious.

The plan Cas came up with involves punching an opening into reality right down to purgatory, which apparently is the place where all the monsters go after they die. Then Cas will power up on their souls – because souls charge up angels like batteries, who would’ve thought – and use his newfound powers to banish Lucifer back to where he came from, or better yet, vaporize him out of existence.

Dean actually likes the plan that is presented to him. A Cas with powers is a Cas who can give him back his brother. And maybe kick all the angels and demons back to their respective realms while he’s at it.

The downside is that he doesn’t believe it. Not any of it. Not like that. He doesn’t trust Cas to let him in on everything about his plans and his motivations, and he doesn’t trust Jena, period.

The fact that Cas seems to buy everything the freaky girl is handing him without question makes Dean doubt his earlier display of distrust. He’s pretty sure he’s being played for a fool here, by both of them.

But he doesn’t say anything. Just listens, collects information that might be worth nothing and collects clues. Jena continues to discourage Cas from following his chosen path, but keeps pointing him in the right direction at the same time. Cas claims not to know anything else about purgatory but continues to ask exactly the right questions. Then they head back into town to get the notes that Miller woman left behind, and that’s when things get really creepy.

Blue Earth is silent when they walk down the street. It hasn’t exactly been busting with activity before, but there’s no sound at all now, like everyone got inside their houses and locked the doors. Like the rain has washed away all life that used to linger here.

Except that the doors aren’t locked. Most doors they pass are open, even missing completely. The rooms Dean can see behind them are dark, empty. But they’re not at the centre of the town yet, where most houses were occupied – not quite. And Dean hasn’t exactly paid attention to the buildings when they came here yesterday, in the dark. It’s possible that the space the people here inhabit is smaller than he thought.

Eventually they get to a point where the street widens a little. The asphalt has disappeared ages ago, leaving a muddy place between buildings. Dean recognizes the house they stayed in. He can make out his own footprints where he stood in the rain.

More footprints lead away from the house and to the church. Two pairs of them.

“What the hell?” Dean mutters.

Cas is silent.

The door he passed through just hours ago is still open. Dean runs over, looks into the building. The room is dark, even though the windows are uncovered.

No, not dark. Blackened.

When Dean steps back and takes a look around, he sees traces of fire on other houses as well. A blackened wall here, a destroyed roof there. Some houses are nothing more than their own skeletons, if that, and it’s absolutely impossible that he missed that until now.

“What’s going on here?” he asks. Jena and Castiel stand side by side with their feet in the mud and say nothing.

Dean starts calling to Taula, Ruth and the others. He gives up quickly, though, when it becomes obvious that there will be no reply.

The town is silent when Jena leads them to the church, where hopefully answers are waiting for them.

 

-

 

The church lies dark and silent like every other building in Blue Earth. The outer doors open to a hall exactly like the one Dean expected to see the first time he entered here: long rows of wooden benches with faded, torn cushions, an altar at the far end, and everything filled with shadows.

The small, high windows let in just enough light to make out the words that were scratched into the backs of the benches closest to the altar. _Helena Bester_ , Dean reads when he crouches down to have a closer look at the ones right before him. _Evan Scott Miller. Taula Erickson. Ancar Bell._

“What’s this?” he demands to know. He’s getting angry now and Cas only looks vaguely uncomfortable. Jena doesn’t seem bothered by any of this at all.

Hardly surprising. She’s behind it, after all. And Castiel doesn’t seem to wonder what’s going on either. “Cas?” Dean asks. “What the hell?”

“I call this the Hall of Involuntary Heroes,” Jena explains. “They called it the same, except for the involuntary part – they chose to ignore that. Until it came to bite them in the ass.”

“What are you talking about? Where is everyone?”

“Gone.” Jena shrugs. “Long ago, actually. It started about a hundred years ago with someone having a brilliant idea.”

“What idea?” Castiel asks quietly.

“The idea to fight against the angels in whatever way they could.” Jena, the angel, doesn’t seem to have any personal feelings about that. She sounds like a school teacher now. “At the beginning it was a brother of ours who came down to take a new vessel, a man from this town. The man eventually gave his consent and was not seen again.”

“So what? According to you, that happens all the time.”

“Exactly. Not as often as you might think, but it happens, and these days more people notice. It’s war. A lot of angels lose their vessels quickly. The last great one I had I was wearing for more than five-hundred years, but after the war started, it only took about ten years until a demon managed to exorcise me.” She snorts, as if the idea was utterly ridiculous. “And I wasn’t even involved in any fighting. Unfortunately, we can’t return into a vessel we were kicked out of, and since then, I had to go through three more vessels. Took me long enough to find one that actually fits well.”

“Like Lucifer?” Dean doesn’t even want to imagine that.

“Not quite. Doesn’t matter – the point is, I did my best to stay out of the war. You can imagine how quickly those angels who actively fight in it go through vessels these days.”

Dean can indeed. “What does that have to do with this pla-” The answer hits him before he can complete the question. These people tried to contribute to fighting the angels in their own way, Jena said.

“You mean, they killed the potential vessels?” When Jena nods, Dean adds, “How did they even know who they were?”

“Things like that run in the family. They only had to find out who had been taken as a vessel before in this area and then they killed everyone from their bloodline in the hope that the angels would run out of vessel eventually. Naturally, the potential vessels didn’t like that plan very much. They fought back. Their friends and families fought with them. After the first few, unexpected killings, this town turned into a war zone. Eventually, fires destroyed much of it, and those who survived died less than a year later of an epidemic. Although, being a fan of irony I actually appreciate the fact that everyone who really _was_ a vessel was brought back to life when the angel in question needed them. They all said yes, by the way. No surprise, since there wasn’t much left for them to stay for in this place.” Jena turns away and leads Dean and Cas up to the altar where a couple of old journals are lying. “Fortunately, old Enina Miller saw some of that in her visions, being a psychic and all. She made copies of all her notes and hid them in places she hoped would be safe. Therefore, the information you came for is still available to you.” She looks proud, as if she were personally responsible for it.

Cas walks up the steps to the altar and takes the journals that have certainly not been hidden right there. He leafs through them, eventually stops at one point and reads with a frown on his face.

Jena’s story he never comments on. He doesn’t seem interested in anything beyond those papers.

But Dean has unanswered questions, even if Cas doesn’t. The most pressing being, “What the fuck is going on here? This place was full of people until we met you.”

“Well, yeah. That.” Jena shrugs in her infuriating way. “Call it a little game. An exercise of power if you want – or simply a warm welcome.”

“So that was you? What even were they?”

“Echoes,” Castiel says, unexpectedly. “They were the people who once lived here.”

Dean feels his stomach sink. “So we’ve slept in a house full of _ghosts_?”

“Not ghosts.” Jena shakes her head. “Call them afterimages. Just ideas in the shape of people, brought to life for your convenience. And mine – or did you think I wanted to sit and wait for you for weeks in a burned-out graveyard?” She winks. “Sometimes, being a really powerful bugger has its advantages.” She turns and walks away, her long hair bouncing left and right with her enthusiastic steps. At first, Dean thinks she’s going to leave the church, but she stops at the last row and sits on one of the benches, apparently happy to wait until Cas finishes his reading.

Dean thinks of little Tom, of Taula and Ruth and feels vaguely sick.

And disgusted. The games angels like to play are beyond tasteless.

Cas doesn’t seem bothered by it at all. He probably knew from the beginning, anyway. Just another thing Dean was never told.

“So, you know her well?” Dean asks conversationally.

Cas doesn’t look up from the journal when he replies. “We met once. He saved my life, later Sam’s.”

“She,” Dean corrects, but Cas ignores him. Eventually, Dean asks, “Did you know this wasn’t real?”

“It was real. In a sense.” Cas still doesn’t look at him, clearly doesn’t have even half of his attention on the conversation.

“You know what I mean.”

“No. I didn’t.”

“You certainly weren’t surprised.”

Again, Cas doesn’t answer. He turns over the page he’s reading, and after a few seconds another one.

“Well?” Dean says after a while. “Does it tell you how to get your grace back?”

Cas continues to ignore him. It’s answer enough for Dean.

Even though he knows no one cares what he does, he tells the room in general that he’s going to get some fresh air. Jena only watches lazily as he walks to the door.

It falls shut behind him with a heavy thud that echoes in the hall like thunder.

 

-

 

Everyone in the town might have been fake, but the horses Dean and Cas arrived on aren’t. Dean finds them in the hold they were taken to after their arrival – alone now, and looking very confused and frightened. He can relate, really, and feels almost sorry for the one that will be left all on its own in a few minutes.

“Shh, it’s okay, baby,” he mutters when he nears the nervous horse he’s been riding all the way with the saddle in his arms. The saddle is very simple and not very comfortable. Dean never looked forward to getting back into it, but right now he couldn’t care less.

It’s probably not going to be a problem much longer, anyway.

The horse is a tall, black animal, a little on the skinny side after the long trek to Minnesota, but still recognizable as a quite pleasing specimen of its race. Dean manages to keep it calm and accept the saddle. Weeks of travelling on its back have given him a certain practice.

Only when he swings himself on the horse’s back does he become aware that he’s going to leave without food. The realisation is without consequence, though – what they’d brought with them is long gone and Blue Earth has nothing but burned wood to offer. There’s nothing he could have taken anyway.

Well, he can hunt. And it might not even matter.

Dean leaves the town on a road that doesn’t go past the church, in the direction of the setting sun.

 

-*Interlude III*-

_It was all over when Castiel came to. For a moment he couldn’t even remember what had happened, but he knew at once that this was it._

_There was no getting out of this one._

_It was his fault, that much was obvious, if only because it was his job to keep them safe. Sam couldn’t do that._

_The memory came back the moment Castiel registered the pain. They’d been out hunting demons when Sam had taken a turn for the worst. His hold on reality had wavered and finally crumbled.  Castiel had aborted their mission the moment he realised Sam wasn’t going to last much longer and begun to lead the way back to their closest safe place, but they were far out and Sam was hallucinating, paranoid. Calling for Dean. He hardly even registered Castiel’s presence, and when he did often thought Castiel was someone or something else. Sam’s physical condition increased the hardship of taking him to safety._

_Perhaps Castiel had been too hasty. Certainly he had been too fixated on Sam and not paid enough attention to their surroundings. In any case it had been a mistake to go out at all, with Sam weak and unstable as he was._

_And now it was over._

_Upon waking, Castiel found himself in an upright position. The pain he felt originated mainly from his arms, which carried most of his weight. He carefully tried to move them and the pain intensified, so logically, he stopped. Only then did he open his eyes, as if he’d been trying to postpone the inevitability of what he would see._

_The room was dim, only lit by the fire in the open fireplace in the centre. The walls seemed to be made of wood, as well as the floor. A few metal shelves divided the large room in two halves; the other half in darkness and invisible to the fallen angel’s eyes. Tools and planks of old wood indicated that he was being held in the working place of a carpenter long gone._

_The room was long but not very broad. Castiel found Sam on the wall opposite him, not fifteen feet away. He was upright like Castiel, his hands fixed to the wall just above his head. His head had fallen onto his chest and he was breathing in short, sharp gasps that reminded Castiel of sobs. Obviously he was conscious, but it was impossible to tell how aware he was._

_Getting lost in memories of hell likely wasn’t going to make much of a difference in this situation. Perhaps it would even be better for Sam, since it would spare him having to witness the torture and murder of his friend that was doubtlessly to follow shortly if Castiel found no way to get them out of here._

_“Sam,” he called, to find out if his friend was with him or not. The sound of his own voice surprised him: it was rough, hoarse, with a hitch at the end of the word he hadn’t anticipated. The pain that pounded through his head intensified._

_Sam moved weakly and let out a desperate whimper. It looked like he was trying to lift his head but didn’t have the strength for it._

_Only after his eyes got used to the flickering light, the many shadows, did Castiel notice the blood that ran down the walls below Sam’s hands. It was then that he understood Sam had been fixed on the wall with nails through his palms. It also seemed like at least one of his legs was broken. Possibly both._

_Castiel’s own legs could carry him and appeared to be okay. A look to his left confirmed that he was secured by barbed wire wrapped around his arms and hands. It hurt, but the bleeding was minimal and there would be no lasting damage if he actually survived._

_Since survival was unlikely, Castiel wondered why he wasn’t hurt worse. Even if their captor’s intention was to torture him to death slowly, there was no point in leaving him as mobile and comparatively pain free as he was._

_The only explanation he could come up with was that he was needed for something. Castiel knew that sometimes humans made their prisoners dig their own graves before the execution, to spare effort and add to the terror the prisoners were feeling, but since he was unlikely to get a grave in the first place, it seemed an unlikely explanation._

_On the other side of the room, Sam groaned. Even that sound lacked strength. “Cas?” he asked, his voice barely carrying the few feet to the fallen angel’s ears and twisted by pain. Once again Sam tried to lift his head. This time the attempt ended in retching and bile splattering to the floor._

_There was no help to be expected from him. Desperate, Castiel tried to move again, ignoring the pain that tore at his arms as he tested his bounds. But they were secure, and all he achieved were open wounds in his arms._

_Sam’s breath hitched in his throat. He had to be in agony, and just like Castiel he had to know what this meant for them. Castiel wished he could think of something to say to comfort his friend, but there was nothing at all._

_He’d once promised Sam he wouldn’t lie to him._

_Movement from the dark half of the room told him that they weren’t alone. Someone snickered softly – it sounded insane and most likely wasn’t human. A human wouldn’t have been able to take them out like that, or so Castiel wanted to believe. A human also probably wouldn’t have left them like this._

_Suddenly he remembered Sam’s panic just before the world turned dark, his attempts to run that Castiel had averted. He had assumed it were his hallucinations that frightened his friend and Sam had been incapable of articulating himself, but looking back, Castiel should have paid more attention to the fact that Sam not only tried to run but also to drag him along._

_Now it was too late. Whoever did this to them caught the perfect moment, with Sam crippled by withdrawal and insanity and Castiel too distracted by Sam to notice the trap he was leading them into. He still didn’t know how the actual attack happened, only that at one point his recollection of the actual events stopped._

_Sloppy steps came closer without hurry. Eventually a man appeared between the shelves that divided the room. He was tall and strong, surprisingly well fed. His hair was unkempt and streaked with grey that didn’t fit with his youthful features. His face was dirty and unshaven but his clothes almost impossibly clean._

_When he looked at Castiel, his eyes flashed black as if in greeting. It merely confirmed what Castiel had already been certain of._

_He wondered if this one worked for Lucifer or for Crowley’s group. Lucifer was much more likely – had this demon been part of those who worked against the devil, he would have killed Castiel and disposed of Sam quickly instead of keeping them here._

_Lucifer, then. The next question was if he was working alone._

_“Will the one you answer to show his face here as well, demon?” Castiel asked, because he wanted to know if the devil would take care of this himself, but mostly to keep the demon’s attention off Sam as long as possible._

_If Lucifer was here, there was no hope. But even if he wasn’t, Castiel had no illusions about the fate that awaited both of them._

_The demon chuckled again. He sounded… Castiel could not quite place it; the best description he could come up with was “happy”._

_“Lucifer won’t disturb us, sweetheart,” the demon said. “He’s gonna get Sammy as soon as I’m done with him, wrapped as a present and willing to say yes to everything asked of him. And I’ll get my reward. But for now we need to get there first, and I’m gonna reward myself for a while.”_

_Castiel’s stomach sank, the direness of their situation becoming more and more real with every word the demon said._

_He didn’t ask what the demon meant in detail, as it was obvious he wanted him to. Demons always wanted to talk, to gloat. Castiel wouldn’t give him the satisfaction. Besides, asking was hardly necessary._

_When the fallen angel didn’t say anything, the demon walked over to Sam and grabbed a handful of his hair, lifting his head so Sam could look at him. From his position on the opposite wall Castiel could see that Sam was weak but very conscious. His eyes were wide and full of fear._

_“Teag,” he whispered, so quietly Castiel could barely hear him. He did not understand the meaning of the word until he saw the demon’s smile._

_“That’s right,” he said proudly. “I knew you’d remember.” He ran his fingertips gently down Sam’s cheek even as he turned his head to address Castiel once more. “You see, Sammy and I are old acquaintances. Friends, you could say. I’d even go so far as to say we were lovers, considering we spend such a wonderful, intimate year together.” Seeing the angel’s eyes widen, Teag put on an expression of fake hurt. “Oh, he didn’t tell you? I’m quite shocked. Shocked and insulted!” To emphasise his words, he gave a kick to Sam’s legs, leaving them in twisted positions that confirmed Castiel’s fear of broken bones. Sam shook and twitched, his breath coming in harsh, gasping sobs. Weak as he was he shouldn’t be able to remain conscious through so much pain. Castiel feared the demon had given him something to keep him from passing out too quickly._

_“I see I need to explain things to you. As it happens, our Lord Lucifer is quite benevolent to his faithful subjects. Loyalty gets rewarded, and for particularly good results, he sometimes lets us have his vessel for our personal amusement for an entire year – when Sam’s dead and in hell, of course. So while_ we _became friends I guess_ you _were playing house in some cave or ruin, waiting for him to start breathing again.”_

_It could have been any of the numerous times Sam had died in recent years. Ever since the disease had settled permanently into his lungs, untouched by resurrections, and his addiction had reached incurable levels, it had become harder and harder to keep him alive even without outside influence._

_He never spoke of his experiences in hell even though Castiel knew he remembered everything, and the angel had been careful never to ask about them._

_Teag, however, seemed determined to reveal as much as possible. “One year is a long time to get to know one another, and yet there is still so much I want to teach him,” he explained. “Sadly, there is only one Sam and so many demons who want him, so Lucifer only ever hands him to out once per person. And in between, he likes to give him to the general public every now and then. You know, the low-ranking, mindless scum.” He snorted in disgust. “They lack imagination, but I guess they make up for it by sheer numbers.” An ugly smirk appeared on the borrowed face before the demon continued. “Anyway, I already got my turn. Found myself missing Sammy, so I thought I’d invite him for a visit.”_

_Castiel closed his eyes and swallowed dryly. “What about me?” he asked, because he was worried about his moderately good condition. If the demon wanted to torture him to death in front of Sam, he would not have gone out of his way to restrain him in a way that left him relatively functional._

_“Why, aren’t you ever the selfish one.” The demon shot him an ugly grin. “There’s an angel I can get behind! Don’t worry, I have something in mind you might like.”_

_Castiel very much doubted that._

_-_

_Before Teag had Castiel do anything, he got Sam away from the wall. He placed a tool box on the floor and for a long moment he eyed the rusty saw contemplatively – long enough for Castiel to be convinced he would use it to simply saw off the parts of Sam he had nailed to the wood. But in the end he put it back and instead took an equally rusty pair of pliers._

_Getting the nails out was difficult. Castiel could hear the crunching of bones when the pliers dug in deep to get a good hold of the first nail and ended up ripping out skin and flesh as well, leaving Sam’s hand a useless mess._

_Held only by one hand, Sam slumped even more on his broken legs. Castiel wished he would finally pass out; instead, Sam somehow found the strength to scream._

_He begged Teag to let him help by keeping Sam upright while the demon pulled out the second nail, but Teag ignored him._

_In the end Sam was left a broken, bleeding heap on the floor. The demon left briefly and came back after a minute with dirty bandages he wrapped tightly around the wounds to keep Sam from bleeding out, before he lifted him up and carried him over to the table._

_This time, Teag secured Sam with nails through his wrists. At one point he stopped briefly, looked down at his victim and made a soft, disapproving sound. “Oh please, Sam,” he said mildly. “That’s just too cute.”_

_Castiel could only guess that Sam had tried to fight him using his powers but completely lacked the strength to reach any result._

_That he even tried showed how desperate he was – and that he never gave up fighting, even if he knew it was hopeless. Castiel knew that soon, when he was gone, there would be no hope at all left for Sam and he wondered if his friend would be able to keep fighting then. He was already so broken._

_In the face of the future awaiting Sam, Castiel didn’t even know if he should hope his friend would continue to say no. But thinking that was a sign of giving up himself – worse, it was a sign of a wrongful shift in his priorities, of putting the fate of a single man over the goal of protecting the world he had chosen to fight for._

_Castiel couldn’t allow himself to do that, even though he felt Sam deserved to be put first by at least one person._

_Pushing the thought aside, he resumed his own struggle against his bonds, regardless of the pain it caused, and the futility._

_As expected, it had no effect on the general situation. Teag didn’t even stop to look his way but took out a knife and used it to cut off Sam’s blood soaked pants, revealing the pitiful state of his legs: both were bruised, swollen, the skin black in places, and below his right knee bloody pieces of bone were sticking out._

_Exhaling slowly and consciously, Castiel closed his eyes. He knew what this meant. It wouldn’t be the first time Sam was raped right before his eyes but the repetition didn’t make it easier to watch. It was not the sight he wanted to leave this world with._

_(The sight he wanted to be his last were Sam and Dean, together, happy and healthy. Castiel knew that wouldn’t happen, though, so he would be satisfied if his last moment did not involve listening to a friend’s hopeless screams.)_

_But the demon was far from finished. When after long seconds Castiel opened his eyes again, Teag was standing right before him, a wire cutter in hand. The angel waited for him to start cutting off his fingers with dread but also a certain, distant sort of relief when finally things started to go the way he expected them to._

_But Teag didn’t cut off his fingers. Instead, he cut the barbed wired restraining Castiel, allowing him to step away from the wall._

_At once, Castiel looked around the room, searching for the way out, anything he could use as a weapon. There was nothing, although he was certain his sword had to be nearby. If this demon was working alone, he wouldn’t have let a weapon that powerful out of his reach._

_It was without consequences. There was no way for Castiel to find the sword in the few seconds he would have even if he managed to take the demon by surprise. And there was no way to run from him, not for Castiel alone and certainly not if he wanted to take Sam along._

_If there had been, Teag wouldn’t have freed him._ Why _he had freed him was not immediately obvious – the act left Castiel confused and increasingly worried._

_His worry and dread grew when the demon pointed a gun at him – a simple, human gun but these days so very capable of killing him – and signalled for him to walk over to where Sam was bound to the table. (There was a distant, unimportant pain in his left thigh when he moved, and the leg of his pants was sticky with half-dried blood.) Sam was watching him approach, his face white with pain._

_“I told you selfishness will work to your advantage,” Teag reminded Castiel with a smirk. “You just need to do as I say and I’ll let you go. If you don’t? Well.” He looked down at the gun and frowned. “This is a little crude and quick for my tastes. Or course I have Sam to play with, but I guess I’ll just shoot off your kneecaps first so you can’t run while I get creative.”_

_“What do you want me to do?” Castiel asked. He noticed that he was rubbing his wrists where the barbed wire had damaged his skin. Superficial wounds._

_“I want you to fuck Sammy here,” the demon said without preamble. Castiel had already expected this answer. He did not flinch._

_“Why?” he asked._

_“I like to watch,” was the blunt answer. “Every now and then. Especially when it proves that even those who think themselves noble and all that shit will do anything to ensure their own survival.”_

_Castiel nodded slowly. “I won’t do it.”_

_“Don’t be ridiculous.” Teag snorted. “What’s it to you? Or to Sam? Everyone’s already done it, if you need some sort of consolation. Or…” He suddenly grinned. “Is it that you fear you might enjoy it? I mean, you can’t be getting laid all that often. Trust me, Sammy’s ass is as good as any. Better even – though you might miss that fact, not being a demon and all. The point remains, you don’t do it and I’ll kill you and do it myself. You do it and make it good for me, and I’ll let you go.”_

_“Both of us?”_

_“Don’t be silly.”_

_“I won’t do it,” Castiel said again. On the table, Sam made a strangled sound. He tried, and failed, to speak. Castiel knew what he wanted to say regardless of his lack of voice._

_“He’s going to kill me no matter what I do. You know that,” he said, his words and tone suggesting a calmness he wasn’t feeling. Sam looked at him with nothing but desperation in his eyes._

_“Please,” he managed to Castiel’s surprise. The word was barely audible. “I don’t mind. Please.”_

_“There would be no point.”_

_Tears ran down the side of Sam’s face as Castiel reached out to lay a gentle hand on his cheek. “I won’t do that to you, my friend.”_

_Teag didn’t interfere when Castiel bent down and pressed a kiss to Sam’s forehead. He almost told him to hold on and keep fighting after he was gone, but couldn’t bring himself to do that to this boy who had already suffered more than any human should be able to bear. At the same time he couldn’t betray everything they fought for so hard by telling Sam it would be okay it finally give in._

_Both options felt like betrayal. In the end, he said nothing._

_Teag didn’t kill him right away. He tied him back up and this time he made sure the barbed wired cut deeply into his flesh and used nails to pin his hands to the wall like he had done with Sam. The pain was nearly unbearable, but Castiel fought to remain conscious, wanting to stay with Sam as long as he could._

_He then had to watch as the demon raped his friend. It was a quick act dominated by hard, practiced movements that gave the impression that Teag more than anything else just wanted to get rid of his erection before moving on with his program._

_There was no doubt what was next on his list. Castiel found his assumption confirmed when after he was done Teag freed Sam and lifted him into an upright position so he could see the angel. At this point, Sam was barely clinging to consciousness despite the drugs, but Castiel could tell he was still aware enough to understand what was going on from the look of sheer desperation in his eyes._

_“Say goodbye to your friend, Sammy,” the demon said softy and pressed a kiss to Sam’s temple. “I wish we’d have more time to play with him, but some of my own friends are approaching and I don’t feel like sharing yet.”_

_He took a hot iron out of the fireplace, but instead of burning out Castiel’s eyes as he probably would have done if he had time, he tossed it onto the floor in the corner furthest from the exit._

_The fire flared up immediately, telling Castiel that the floor must have been drenched in oil or some other accelerant. Within seconds, the room filled with smoke._

_Pain flared up anew when Castiel tore at his bindings and nearly robbed him of his consciousness. He heard Sam’s broken wail and something that might have been his name when Teag picked the human up and carried him away through the smoke._

_It took another minute of hopeless struggle before blood loss, smoke inhalation, the pain of his wounds and the growing heat took away Castiel’s awareness. His last thought was, unexpectedly, of Dean._

_-_

_When he came to, the house was still burning. Castiel stared at it and tried to come up with an explanation why he saw it from the outside._

_His hands sent spikes of pain through his entire body when he made the mistake up pushing himself up from the ground. He quickly drew them to his chest as if keeping them close to his body would lessen the agony. It was an instinct left by his vessel and he paid it no mind._

_Besides the fire, a wide, empty plain was all he could see. The ground beneath him was hard from months without rain and the sky above the dark grey of night. Clouds drifted by in quick succession, but here on the ground the wind was barely noticeable at all._

_His clothes smelled of smoke. Castiel bend forward as coughs wacked his body and ended up spitting dark phlegm into the dirt. The coughing aggravated the pain in his hands and when he tried to stand he fell to his knees and threw up._

_In all the time he had been mortal, Castiel had never felt this miserable. He thought of Sam and wasn’t sure if the tears that streamed down his cheeks were only caused by the coughing._

_They had to be. It was useless to cry over things that could not be changed._

_Eventually, he managed to get up. The house was still burning. It belonged to a farm, Castiel saw now – or rather, it once belonged to a farm. The farm was already gone, just burned out ruins, and soon there would be no evidence that one building survived the first fire._

_There were no other buildings far and wide. Castiel didn’t know where he was. There were no landmarks anywhere within sight._

_Once, he could have gone down to earth on any random spot and been able to tell exactly where it was in relation to everywhere else. Now he merely had the vague knowledge that he was somewhere near the east coast; maybe Pennsylvania, or New Jersey._

_There were no traces of Sam or the demon that took him. No trace of whoever had saved Castiel from the fire either. Whoever had done it had just pulled him out and left him lying on the ground, unconscious, bleeding and without protections. Castiel could only hope that that someone had been in a hurry because they had to go and save Sam next, but he couldn’t summon much hope._

_Something caught his eye in the dirt a few feet away: a glint in the darkness, metal reflecting the light of the fire. Picking it up with his injured hands was unpleasant, but he ignored the pain since it didn’t signal immediate danger to his life._

_It was his sword._

_Castiel’s confusion grew. Why would anyone rescue him, give him a weapon to fend for himself and then abandon him here without a word?_

_The plain offered no answers for him and Castiel had things to do. Confusion would not improve the situation, so the fallen angel simply accepted things the way they were for the moment. He cut stripes out off the hem of his shirt with his sword and used them to bandage his hands. Then he made his way over to the burning house to see if he could find any indication where Teag had taken Sam._

_-_

_Sam’s blood had left traces on the ground. Castiel found them after sunrise and followed, but the trail stopped after a while and all he was left with was the general direction He kept walking it, looking in every cave, through every ruin. There was nothing else to be found._

_After a week of searching, Castiel found himself wondering if Sam had broken yet._

_There were few settlements this far north. He visited every single one he could find for food and information. In the first one no one had heard anything of demon activities nearby, so Castiel changed his direction and moved west, to the next._

_Teag liked to nail Sam to things. He would need a house for that, not a cave. Alternatively a tree, but he wouldn’t like to be out in the open with his captive too much. Since north there was not much left, west seemed the more likely direction._

_In the next village no one had seen a demon either, but a few people had gone on a hunting trip and never returned. It could have had any number of reasons, but Castiel followed his instincts and their trail. It led him further west. He never found bodies, blood, or signs of a fight. The hunters hadn’t been killed, they’d simply continued walking._

_Possessed._

_These must have been the “friends” Teag didn’t want to share Sam with. They were easier to follow, not bothering to hide their traces. Castiel could only hope they would lead him to Sam._

_For days he followed them to the west. Closter to Michigan, to Detroit._

_Sam hadn’t given in yet. He couldn’t have. Lucifer and Michael wouldn’t have wasted this much time._

_In the end, Castiel found them in an old warehouse in Williamsport. By that time, he had been following their trail for weeks, despairing more and more as he could no longer deny how unlikely it was that Sam would hold on. He thought Castiel was gone. There was nothing for him to look forward to but eternal, unrelenting torture._

_The only good thing about Castiel’s rescue having happened without notice of anyone was that the demons didn’t know he was alive any more than Sam did and therefore never made an effort to hide their trail. Castiel could tell when the group following Teag caught up with him, because after that Teag didn’t bother to be careful either._

_Sometimes Castiel found the places where they had stayed and identified them by the bloodstains on the floor, the tools they left behind when the demons used them too hard and they broke. In one half-burned out ruin he found a large slap of skin, dropped to the floor after someone had torn it off a still living body._

_Once he arrived before the blood on the walls had completely dried, but the demons and Sam had already disappeared in the broken maze Williamsport had become and he needed two days to finally find them._

_The warehouse was big, had several stories. Sam and his captors were on the second level and it wasn’t hard to sneak near them – not hard at all._

_He had feared that he might hear Sam scream and steeled himself so it wouldn’t cause him to act rashly and ruin everything. Sam, however, was silent. Castiel heard the talk and the laughter of unfamiliar voices, but Sam never made a sound. Then, just before he reached a point from where he could look into the room, he heard Teal say, unexpectedly close, “Think they might be done yet? It’s been two fucking days.”_

_Castiel stopped. Only a thin wall separated him from a group of demons. His hand tightened around his sword and he tried to figure out from their voices how many enemies he was dealing with._

_“Guess they want their fun, too,” another voice answered to Teag’s words. “Some selfish bastards down there obviously don’t want to share, you know?”_

_If Teag recognized the allusion to his own attempt to keep his new toy for himself as long as possible, he didn’t show it. He only complained some more. “His wounds haven’t even_ started _to heal yet,” Castiel heard him say. “This is taking forever. If they keep that up we’re not going to get him back before Lucifer moves in.”_

_The thought seemed to bother him greatly, but then Castiel heard him move away, back to the others._

_He understood now what was going on even before he decided he could risk a glance into the room. Sam was dead, and had been for a while. That was why he wasn’t screaming._

_The angel took a deep breath and held it as he looked around the corner, as if breathing would increase the risk of being seen. Though it was Sam his eyes sought, it was the demons he saw first. There were many of them. Eight he saw at once, two more whose voices he heard from somewhere out of sight._

_There was no way of taking them out all at once, alone._

_Sam he found so close to his own position he nearly overlooked him at first. So close it was unbelievably hard not to reach out and take him._

_He was fixed to the metal frame of old industry shelves with bolts through his hands, wrists and elbows, and as Castiel had already suspected he was dead. His head hung low enough to expose the patches where hair and skin had been torn away and the skull was visible, but not low enough to hide the fact that his eyes were gone – burned out for all Castiel could see. One of his fingers was stripped of skin and muscle, leaving only the naked bone, and two had been torn off completely. What remained of his hands was a mangled mess._

_Those were the injuries Castiel was able to make out during his brief glimpse, and it was more than he ever wanted to see._

_It made it all the harder to retreat back into hiding and then down the stairs and out of the building, but Castiel, while occasionally prone to emotionally charged reactions, was rational enough to know that he would get nothing out of an attack besides captivity and death. He had expected to find not more than five demons here, and even then he would only have attacked if circumstances and the element of surprise had given him a realistic chance of overpowering them. As things were, the visit had only served to get a picture of what to expect, so he could come up with a plan._

_He had to come up with a plan quickly, before they moved on and took Sam somewhere else – or Sam gave in._

_Holy water was the first thing he needed. If he managed to catch them all at once, he could strike them down with his sword while they were distracted by the pain. But getting so much water there and dumping it on so many demons at once would be nearly impossible, since naturally the water pipes of the factory had stopped working almost forty years ago._

_Which brought up the further problem of finding a large enough body of water nearby. Alternate plans included devil’s traps (which he wouldn’t be able to draw without being seen) or getting them out one by one and taking them out one after the other (which would not work without them getting suspicious). Giving up was no an option, but after one day of not coming up with anything better than dumping a swimming pool on them, Castiel was almost willing to risk an open attack._

_He’d be killed and of no further use for Sam, but he would be of just as little use if he didn’t do anything._

_-_

_When he saw the fire, Castiel was convinced that the demons had burned down the warehouse for whatever reason and moved on. Swallowing his desperation, he ran towards the source of the flames going up into the night sky, determined to stick close to the group and hope for better circumstances during their next stop._

_He refused to dwell on the possibility of Lucifer having moved into Sam’s body and burning down his demons in celebration of his victory._

_But he got it all wrong. As he ran close to the factory the smoke got thicker, so it was only when he was very near that he noticed the figure coming towards him. It was a tall, board-shouldered man with blonde, unruly hair and clothes that were simple but almost absurdly neat and clean, especially considering he was walking out of a burning building. He carried Sam’s body in his arms._

_Castiel didn’t know him, and at first he was convinced it was one of the demons who had been out of his line of sight the day before. Only when he came closer did he recognize him, with the last fading remnants of his grace, as an angel._

_Perhaps one of Lucifer’s fallen followers. Castiel had long since lost the ability to tell from the quality of the other’s grace. He neared his former brother cautiously, but without making an attempt to conceal his presence._

_The angel didn’t give him more than a brief glance. As soon as he had stepped out of the worst smoke he knelt and placed Sam on the ground, in the middle of the street. Sam didn’t move at all; Castiel suspected that he was still dead._

_He found it confirmed when he knelt beside his friend. Sam wasn’t breathing and there was no heartbeat to be found. However, his hands and scalp had healed and when Castiel lifted his eyelids he found both eyes intact. There were no other obvious wounds to be found on his naked, emaciated body; only some scars remained, utterly insufficient for telling the story of what Sam had gone through._

_The other angel stood, but didn’t move away. “Don’t get your hopes up, brother,” he said, seemingly uncaring. “I don’t think he’s going to come back this time.”_

_He was powerful – this close, Castiel could sense that this one commanded much more power than he ever did himself, and along with the realization came a wave or sudden, unexpected anger._

_“You could have saved him,” he spat, even as he slipped out of his coat to drape it over his friend._

_“Excuse me?” The other angel sounded taken aback and slightly insulted. “I believe I just did. Oh, and you, by the way, when your demonic friend there tried to roast you the other day. How about some gratitude for that?”_

_Castiel ignored the information about his own rescue – it seemed entirely inconsequential now. “You could have saved him anytime!” he snapped. “_ Any _time! But you waited for so long.” If Castiel had the power he would have gotten Sam out in seconds, and the demons would have been dust. “Then you come and tell me he’s broken, when you could easily have prevented it!”_

_The snort he got in response sounded almost gentle. “Wouldn’t have made a difference. A couple hot pokers more or less, a few more years in hell – that’s just details now. He’s been getting there anyway. I won’t deny that it’s admirable and incredible how long the boy held on, but everyone has a breaking point, and if I’d saved him sooner, he’d still have broken. It might have taken a week longer, or two, but what does that matter in the end?”_

_The other angel was so powerful and he seemed so certain. Castiel could only sit beside his dead friend and listen to the words that sounded like a sentence to him. “Then why did you save him at all?”_

_The angel sighed. “Because I’m growing tired of this game. And because you would have gone and gotten yourself killed otherwise. I wanted you to be around when it happens.”_

_“Why?” Castiel’s voice was but a whisper._

_“Because all your sacrifices were in vain. Everything happens the way our father decided it long ago. It’s a lesson you still need to learn, little brother.”_

_The air was full of smoke that stung in his eyes and made them water when Castiel looked up. There was no one standing beside him._

_-_

_When Sam’s body came back to life, it didn’t happen with a blinding flash of light that signalled the arrival of the devil himself. It didn’t even happen with a scream. It happened quietly, with an intake of breath, followed by another. The third breath caught in Sam’s throat and he coughed weakly. He didn’t regain consciousness until much later, and even that happened nearly without notice; while his eyes were open, Castiel was never quite sure how_ aware _Sam actually was._

_He didn’t react to Castiel’s words and touches. When Castiel forced Sam to look at him, his friend turned his head away and closed his eyes as if he were unbelievably tired. Tears ran down his face, eventually, and those remained the only open display of emotions he showed at all. But even silent as he was, Castiel could feel his despair every moment he was awake._

_Sam never spoke. He didn’t acknowledge that he had been freed or that Castiel was still alive. He didn’t scream and struggle through his nightmares, and maybe that was the worst thing of all. Everything about Sam Winchester radiated defeat._

_Castiel didn’t know what to do._

_He couldn’t even get Sam off the street; not all of his wounds had been healed and the first time Castiel tried to move him, Sam coughed blood, so the angel just let him lie there and kept vigil, sword in hand. He used every piece of clothing he could spare to make it more comfortable for Sam, but besides making sure his head didn’t lie directly on the ground there wasn’t much he could do._

_No one ever came near them. This part of the city was nearly intact, but entirely abandoned, and if anyone noticed the death of the demons the other angel had killed, they didn’t care enough to check. The warehouse burned to the ground, and when the last flames died Sam got a fever that didn’t go away. His troubled breathing became wheezing. He lost consciousness and didn’t wake up again. Castiel did all he could to keep him alive, but he knew it was futile. Sam was too sick, too hurt, and not fighting. Three days after his rescue, he died._

_Castiel didn’t make use of the opportunity to move him. He didn’t do anything but wait. For three days he sat beside Sam’s corpse and waited for the moment Lucifer opened his eyes._

_When he did, Castiel would be here, his sword waiting. He would try and fail to end this. Only the sword of an archangel could kill another archangel and Castiel’s blade Lucifer would barely feel. He would do it anyway, take responsibility for his failure and accept the consequences. He never thought about running away._

_Only much later did he realise that this meant Sam’s attempts to make his friend live and fight for all of humanity, not just Sam, had been in vain._

_-_

_Sam stayed dead for four days. In the end, he woke with a scream._

_When Castiel took hold of his flailing arms, Sam clung to him like a drowning man. He didn’t stop screaming until his voice ran out, and when he reached the limit of his meagre strength, he curled up on his side, hid his face between his arms and wept._

_Against all probability he had not given in. Castiel sat back and looked at the miserable pile of human being in quiet awe for a long time._

_Sam was better this time. His body was able to stay alive, but he was far from fully healed. At the very least, Castiel was able to get him into one of the houses surrounding them, off the street._

_Again, Sam didn’t speak. Castiel made him as comfortable as possible, did his best to calm him down, but he didn’t seem able to reach through the cocoon of misery and despair Sam was wrapped in. When Sam slept, nightmares tormented him. When he was awake, he was crying most of the time, and too exhausted and sick to do much else. Still it was better than before, when Sam only seemed to still there because he was too far gone to realise giving up required a conscious act on his part._

_It was better, but not much. Castiel did his best to take care of Sam, but his friend wouldn’t eat, and the angel was painfully aware that he had to. If he didn’t, Sam would die again, and Castiel knew he wouldn’t make it through another year in hell._

_Sam knew it as well. That was the reason for his desperation. He knew that only defeat waited in his future. There was no way he could win. The next time a demon or Lucifer himself laid hand on him or anyone else because of him he would give in and betray everything he fought for, for so long. And even though the knowledge was destroying him, there was nothing he could do to change it._

_Everyone had a breaking point._

_“I will not let them anywhere near you,” Castiel said softly while his own desperation threatened to swallow him. He laid a gentle hand on Sam’s brow and promised, “You’re safe now. No one will ever hurt you again.”_

_As a result, Sam looked at him for the first time since coming back. There was an open question in his eyes, and Castiel understood: he had spent decades doing his best to protect his friend, but he had never before made any promises._

_Now that he had, he would keep it._

_“I know a way,” he explained. “It’s not easy, but it will keep you away from them. For good. Forever.” He didn’t even know if that was true, had only heard of it briefly before and no guarantee it would work. But in this moment he swore he would_ make _it work. Nothing else was acceptable._

_And that moment, Castiel knew how Dean had felt when it came to his brother and failure simply was not an option._

_It made it all the more tragic how completely his old friend had failed in the end._

 


	9. Chapter 9

There is a problem Dean hasn’t anticipated: he doesn’t know how to summon a demon.

It’s so ridiculous he actually laughs a little when he becomes aware of it. He’s pretty sure he actually does know how to do it – more, that he did it before, more than once. In fact, he knows with absolute certainty that just a day before, when the plan first formed in his mind, he knew how to do it. He didn’t even think about it – the knowledge was simply part of his being. It would have been just as silly to try to summon it as it would have to actively remind himself how to walk.

And now it’s gone. Dean left Blue Earth going west until he found a road and then he followed the road, hoping he would eventually find a crossroad. It didn’t even take long, in the end. And when he arrived and decided to put his plan into motion, he very nearly actually did it before he realised he didn’t know what exactly he wanted to do.

The knowledge is there – Dean feels so sure about it when he doesn’t try to remember, but the moment he does, it slips away from him.

As if it was deliberately blocked. And he can very well imagine who is responsible for that.

For a while, Dean attempts to not think about it and just _do_ it, but all that get him is a hole he dug in the centre of the crossroads and no idea what to do with it. He’s pretty sure he needs to put something in it, but it’s hard to let his subconscious take care of that when he doesn’t even have the demanded objects.

Collecting things that are hard to get and probably require a certain degree of improvisation these days is damn hard without thinking of it.

What Dean thinks of – after giving up – is Castiel. He finds himself a hidden place between rocks overgrown by sickly-yellow ranks and hopes his dear angels – both of them – won’t find him when they come looking. With Jena that’s unlikely, since she’s all powerful and that, but then Dean remembers that thanks to some hocus-pocus Castiel did to his ribs, even archangels can’t find him and feels a lot more optimistic.

He set his camp a few minutes’ walk away from the crossroads, as far into the rocks as he could charm his horse into going. They shouldn’t be too easy to find here, he decides – even though this is the crossroad closest to Blue Earth in this direction and therefore one of the first places Cas is going to look for him. He isn’t stupid, after all.

Just untrustworthy.

Food is a problem. The horse finds something to munch on between the rocks and happily does so until it had enough and lies down to rest, but Dean isn’t so keen on eating grass, and he hasn’t been this hungry since they traded their food for stupid permits. He’s come across a couple of apple trees on the way and even went off the road for half an hour to collect as many of the tiny fruits as he could, but there wasn’t a great number to be found in the first place, and the few he had are long gone.

He gave one to the horse, actually. It looked like it would like that.

Now he waits for nightfall with a rumbling stomach and all his senses tuned in to his surroundings. It’s been a while since he became aware that he has no weapon that can kill demons, but there’s nothing he can do about that and if the angels don’t find him, neither will the demons.

Unfortunately, that includes the ones he wants to find him, of course.

Eventually, night falls, but Dean is too wired to sleep. He sits propped against a rock in a damn uncomfortable position almost until sunrise, every now and then shifting around until he ends up in another position that’s just as uncomfortable.

When he finally slips into sleep, he only notices when he turns another time and finds Michael sitting on the rock beside him, an unreadable expression on his disturbingly youthful face.

Hell, that boy couldn’t have been more than twenty when Michael stole his body!

“It’s been a while since you showed your face,” Dean growls, acting like he actually _wanted_ the angelic dick to keep stalking his dreams.

“Contrary to what you might believe, I do have responsibilities to take care of besides you,” Michael says with insufferable dignity. “I have a war to fight, as you know.”

“And yet you’re here.”

“I owe you that much. After all, you _want_ me to be here.”

“Not really. But I expected you to come. And since you’re here, you can give me back my knowledge of demon summoning rituals. And don’t deny it – I know it’s you who blocks it!”

Michael doesn’t try to deny it. “I am responsible for you, Dean,” he says, sounding like a mild, patient parent – the kind of parent Dean is pretty sure he never had. “I can’t let you make a mistake like this. It is my duty to protect you.”

“To control me, you mean?” Dean snorts. “Do I have to remind you that you no longer run around in this body? And you’re not getting it back, you lying scumbag. So just give me back my bloody memory and let me make my own mistakes!”

Michael frowns at him. Slightly irritated. Insufferable bastard.

“I never lied to you,” he says, latching onto the entirely wrong thing and ignoring the obvious issue.

“Of course you didn’t. Except for the point where you tried to influence my actions by making me believe I raped my fucking brother. When in fact it was _you_ …” Dean’s voice almost breaks and he has to stop talking. It hits him like a sledgehammer the moment he says the words. This guy, this asshole right before him, raped his brother.

“I have been nothing but honest to you,” Michael protests, and Dean wants to punch him. “I know the truth is brutal, but you deserve to know, so you can create your own picture instead of depending on the one others feed you. I know Castiel told you something else, and I am certain you believed him willingly.”

“Because I know in this regard, at least, he was telling the truth.”

“Do you? Tell me, Dean, do you actually remember? Or do you just judge Castiel’s words the truth because it is easier that way.” There is nothing on Michael’s expression but mild curiosity, but perhaps he simply hasn’t learned how to use this face yet and his collection og expressions is limited. “Think about it, Dean: didn’t Castiel always tell you just what you wanted to hear?”

Dean’s first instinct is to laugh at him and maybe spit in his face. After all, Cas has told him a damn lot of things he certainly _didn’t_ want to hear. That he destroyed the world is only one of them. But when Dean thinks about it, he can’t deny that he had similar thoughts before. There were uncomfortable truths, but they were so fundamental that Castiel could hardly have gotten away with keeping them from Dean. And then there’s his brother – no doubt Cas’ bitterness about the kid’s fate is real, and no doubt he wants Dean to suffer for it, at least a little. So Dean has to wonder if the unpretty things he learned about himself are really the truth or just Cas wanting him to feel bad.

Because whenever Dean started to go in a direction Cas wasn’t happy with, whenever Cas was threatened with losing him, he started presenting things from a different perspective to make Dean feel better. To keep him close and under control. Like he did when Dean had his breakdown weeks ago, in the empty house with the burned out room.

It’s what caused Dean to leave in the first place, after all.

But of course, now here’s Michael, doing exactly the same.

The archangel seems to notice his doubts. “I can help you,” he says. “If you’ll let me. I cannot restore all your memories – it would break your mind. But I can give you back some of them. Enough for you to see I am the only one who’s completely honest with you, regardless of how it makes you feel.”

So far, the only one who was completely honest to Dean was Lucifer, but he doesn’t think mentioning that would improve the situation. “How would I know you’re not making things up? Or showing them out of context? It wouldn’t prove anything.”

“Wouldn’t it? Or are you simply afraid of learning something about yourself you don’t want to know?” Michael’s expression softens. “Don’t worry, Dean. It will all make sense to you. You did nothing wrong, nothing unforgivable, and you will see that, if you dare to look.”

Dean hesitates. He feels challenged in his pride, and at the same times as if he’s walking into a trap. Most of all, he wants answers and fears Michael might be right.

“Then do it,” he says, and grinds his teeth before the angel even starts.

 

-

 

It’s not at all as he expected. Dean remembers, but not at once. It’s like he’s living everything again, yet his head is also full of the future. He knows where he is and what is happening in the present, with Michael’s hand soft and cool on his forehead, yet the knowledge quickly fades to the background and the memory doesn’t feel like a memory but an event. In an instant Dean knows this isn’t pulled up from his own mind but from Michael’s who was there, in the back of Dean’s consciousness and lived through everything as a spectator, gaining full insight into Dean’s thoughts and feelings because their minds were merged the way they are now. Just as quickly, Dean lets the knowledge slip away as unimportant as the events of the past wash him away.

It’s like a dream where he knows he’s dreaming but doesn’t care, and even though the dream just started he’s at home in the dream world, knowing everything there is to know about it and his role in at as if it had been going on for years. Michael touches his mind and _Dean is standing at the edge of a cliff, feeling the wind and smelling the salt of the sea as if for the first time in years. And it_ is _the first time in years – the first time since he said Yes that he’s in control, that he’s himself and not just a spectator of his own life, getting glimpses and impressions every now and then but mostly unimportant as if he didn’t even exist. He didn’t anticipate, when he gave his consent, that it would be like this, couldn’t foretell the helplessness and insignificance he would be feeling after he gave up every chance of making his own decisions, of making a difference._

_Michael means well, he knows. Michael was the lesser of two evils when Dean chose him, but he knows now that the angel only intends to do the right thing, and that he wants to protect Dean as much as he can. But it still means a total loss of control, and that is hard to deal with._

_It seems even worse now he’s got it back, because he knows that it’s only for a moment. It’s not like Michael wouldn’t give him a break every now and then, but a war is a serious business and the leader of the armies of heaven simply cannot afford to take a break from his vessel. Even now he’s still there, ready to take over and smite anyone who might pose a thread, and this little episode in itself is a gift they can hardly afford. Dean is aware of that, and it’s not that he isn’t grateful._

_It’s just that he hates what his life has become._

_It’s all Sam’s fault, of course. It was Sam who drove him to say yes in the first place, because Dean knew sooner or later his brother would betray them and he couldn’t let that happen. He remembers looking at the world and feeling the weight of the decision; a little girl running by, and he would wonder if she’d be one of the people who’d die if Michael got his vessel, while knowing she would die in any case if he didn’t._

_And all that mess wouldn’t have happened in the first place if Sam had listened to Dean and not to Ruby. If he hadn’t been so arrogant, so convinced that he knew better,_ was _better than anyone else and let the devil out into the world. Everyone who’d already died was Sam’s fault, but they were also Dean’s fault because he hadn’t stopped it, because he had hesitated too long to let Michael in, and because he was Sam’s big brother and therefore responsible for his actions. He had known Sam couldn’t be trusted, after all. He had known it like Dad had known it but in his naïve love for his brother he hadn’t been able to accept the cold truth until it was too late._

 _And even after Lilith, when Sam was so full of regret and shame, Dean knew those feelings weren’t real. Sam might have believed they were, but in the end they were just the shame of being proven wrong. Deep down inside, Dean knew, Sam was still convinced that he was better than Dean, that_ he _should be the one in charge, and that he couldn’t possibly go wrong. Dean knew Sam was making up excuses for his actions, and for drinking demon blood again – getting back his powers, repeating the same mistakes over and over because he was a junkie and junkies couldn’t be trusted. It would lead him straight to Lucifer, and he’d probably feel like a fucking hero when he finally said yes and doomed the world. Just because someone told him he had to and Sam so desperately wanted to be right._

_And Dean couldn’t stop it because Sam didn’t listen to him. Just like he couldn’t stop it before because Sam didn’t listen to him and Dean wasn’t hard enough, was too blinded by a lifetime wasted on taking care of this boy._

_It was his fault, and it was Sam’s fault that it was his fault and Dean hates him for it. It’s a hate that was born of love and disappointment; the strongest ingredients for wounds that will never heal._

_Now Dean looks down at his brother and feels nothing but empty rage that needs an outlet. (Another Dean is looking down with him and feels something else.) It was Michael who found Sam, even though it wasn’t easy. Demons working against Lucifer have closed him in a block of concrete and thrown him in the sea, and the block is decorated with every angel-repelling symbol ever created. It took torturing a couple of Crowley’s minions to find out what they did, but once Michael knew, finding the block and taking it back to the cliff was easy._

_Michael was the one who broke Sam out of there, but Dean has been somewhat aware of the events and the angel felt his anger. He retreated, leaving Dean in charge from the moment Sam came awake with a gasp and limbs flailing in remembered panic._

_Then there was a moment of stillness, followed by Sam sitting up and becoming aware of his surroundings. He saw Dean and his eyes widened in an almost comical mixture of confusion, fear and hope._

_“Dean?” he asked, his voice thin and rough and full of doubt._

_“How do you know that?” Dean wants to know. The last several times they met, it was Michael in here, and for all he knows, to Sam there never has been a doubt about it._

_“It’s you.” Sam shakes his head in amazement. “I can tell. You’re not Michael. Oh God, Dean…” Tears fill his brother’s eyes, and at the same time Dean’s rage flares up anew. There Sam sits, acting as if all will be fine now Dean is himself again. Showing no sign of awareness that Dean might hate him. The thought doesn’t even seem to occur to him, as if he didn’t see Dean actually has a_ reason _to._

_Ignoring his own faults, as always._

_“I’m not here to stay,” Dean says, and Sam freezes at the coldness of his voice. “Michael just kindly stepped back for a moment because I have something to say to you.”_

_“…Dean?” The doubt is back in Sam’s voice, and stronger now. His brother displays signs of not adoring him and immediately Sam jumps to the conclusion that it can’t be him after all. Dean would laugh if the disgust hadn’t paralyzed his face._

_“It’s been brought to my attention that you keep trying to find a way to get me back,” he says, his voice icy. “Did it ever occur to you that maybe I don’t_ want _to get back to you, Sam? Newsflash: I didn’t let Michael in just because I had no other choice – I actually mostly did it to get away from_ you _!”  Now the laugh does come, short and bitter. “I tried to cut off contact, but you found your way back. I couldn’t even escape you in death because someone would bring me back anyway. Don’t you see? Michael is my only chance of ever being free of your oppressing existence. Because you just can’t see that I don’t want you anymore! I haven’t for a long time – maybe even before Ruby. Maybe before I went to hell.  Because deep down inside I always felt you weren’t worth it.”_

_Sam stares at him dumbly. He doesn’t say anything, which is just fine with Dean._

_“Stop running after me,” he says. “You and Cas, stop acting like I got kidnapped or anything like that. I don’t want you to “save” me. Leave me the fuck alone!” Taking a deep breath, Dean finds he enjoys the expression on Sam’s face more than he thought he could enjoy anything anymore. “I’m perfectly happy with things being the way they are,” he continues.” If you ever find a way to pull Michael out of me, all you’ll get out of it is me hating you even more than I already do. I swear to God, I’ll feed you to Lucifer myself!”_

_“You don’t mean that,” Sam says, looking at him with those damn puppy dog eyes Dean has fallen for far too often. But not this time._

_“Oh, I say something you don’t like, so of course I can’t possible mean it! Guess what? I don’t exist just to please you and make up for your shortcomings, little brother!”_

_Sam is still on the floor and it occurs to Dean that he probably couldn’t get up if he wanted to. Good. Because Dean can tell that Sam still doesn’t believe him and he has to convince him that Dean really doesn’t want to get back to him. That he has no problem with hurting him, humiliating him and leaving him in the dust._

_He starts with kicks that leave Sam breathless and unable to speak. Only when Sam has been beaten into submission and is convinced that it is over does Dean sit down on top of him, tears off his brother’s torn and bloody clothes and proceeds to prove him wrong. (Because he is a memory he doesn’t hear the other Dean who is screaming at him to stop.)_

_He only stops when Sam isn’t moving anymore and stands, filled with a grim satisfaction and the irony that, after all, he has still been able to teach his brother a lesson he won’t easily forget._

_Michael stirs inside him and calls for attention. He senses another angel nearing; fallen, its grace almost gone. Dean straightens and looks down the slope leading up to the cliff to see Castiel run up it. He is still far away and wouldn’t have been able to see Dean even if he had looked in the right direction. He moves with haste but without caution and it is obvious that he doesn’t know Michael is anywhere near him. His grace is so far gone that he can’t even sense an archangel anymore (and the other Dean wonders about that because Cas has sensed Lucifer all the way to Atlanta but he didn’t sense Jena and not even Michael back when he was still that much stronger and maybe he hasn’t been lying about that after all)._

_Something changes. There is a sense of confusion, vague and distant, followed by something like triumph. It feels wrong and alien even in the memory and then_ Michael lowers his hand and Dean is standing between the rocks again, gasping for air as if he’d just been pulled from a river he was drowning in.

“No,” he says. He’s crying, he realises, and that’s odd because he feels overwhelmed and disoriented, but not sad. Not desperate. Because as promised this vision really _did_ open his eyes.

“What a load of bullshit,” he spits as his anger wells up and finally takes over.

Michael looks a little taken aback. It’s obviously not the reaction he expected. In fact, he looks _honestly_ and _genuinely_ upset, and Dean just _righteously_ wants to punch him in the face.

So he does.

It has no effect, of course. It doesn’t even hurt his hand because this is just a dream and Michael isn’t really here to be punched, but it probably gets the point across.

“I understand the experience was intense, especially considering your general amnesia, but that was uncalled for,” Michael scolds. “It may be uncomfortable but that is what you asked for, is it not? What I showed you is the truth. How can you doubt your own memory?”

“I know myself, that’s how!” Dean informs him furiously. “And this? It all felt wrong. I don’t even remember my brother and know I’d never think of him like that. And I’d never… If I wanted to punish him, there’d have been other ways. You think I would sacrifice my self-respect for some stupid bitch who makes me feel like that?” He’s beginning to ramble, so he pulls himself to a stop. Fact is, Dean can hardly tell lie from truth right now. All those wrong memories are scattered in his head, confusing him. He needs a moment to think.

Still, he knows what he knows. And nothing of that was true. “I felt you inside my mind the whole time,” he says. “That was just you.”

“I’m sorry you feel that way.” Michael does sound regretfully, but also a little distracted, like he has trouble staying focussed on the conversation. “I see Castiel had more success twisting your mind than I feared.” With that he’s gone. Dean, who expected an extended argument and still has so much rage he needs to expel, is left standing there alone, blinking at the empty spot.

Then he wakes up.

 

-

 

Everything is wrong. This wasn’t at all how it was supposed to go. Dean still has no chance of doing what he came for, because one of the countless the memories Michael did not return is that of summoning rituals. He doesn’t even know if he wants to anymore. He is, frankly, confused, and his mind is filled with things that are bad and wrong and evil.

At least he has clarity now. He didn’t hurt his brother, not like that. And perhaps Castiel has been the most honest with him after all. Michael he can’t trust, that much is clear.

Maybe Castiel’s plan can even work. Dean just has to trust him and Hell, that’s hard. Almost impossible, since Cas wants to elevate himself to godlike levels and Dean doesn’t even know if he’s thinking of anyone’s benefit but his own.

But then, he _did_ drag Dean along all the time for nothing but the increased danger of being found by Michael. Or sold out.

Perhaps when he told Dean he did it for the sake of their old friendship, he was actually speaking the truth. It seems, at least, that he’s not secretly conspiring with Jena after all but really unable to sense other angels, except for Lucifer. For whatever reason.

Perhaps not. But Dean is aware that right now he’s not exactly setting an example in trustworthiness.

Also, with his other plan facing unsolvable difficulties, it’s not like he has another choice but return to Cas and Jena and stick with their plan. But it isn’t going to be a glorious return, and Dean isn’t looking forward to it.

If he’s really, really lucky, Cas will be so absorbed in his research that he won’t even have noticed Dean was gone.

 

-

 

He’s not lucky. Of course he isn’t – for all he knows, Dean has never been lucky in his life.

He’s a little lucky, perhaps, because Jena is nowhere to be seen. It’s just Cas, on his horse, riding down the road towards Dean’s crossroad. Of course, by that time, Dean has long since left the crossroad and is on his way back to Blue Earth. He sees Cas long before he meets him, and when Cas sees him he slows down so it still takes them some time to meet in the middle. Much time for Dean to think about what to say.

They meet. They dismount. And then Castiel punches him in the face.

After that, Dean doesn’t feel obliged to apologize anymore.

 

-

 

“Where is your half-psychopathic angel bride?”

The question is asked after hours of strained silence and earns Dean only a blank look. “Jena,” he clarifies. “Or whatever her name is.”

“She left,” Castiel explains. “Didn’t want to get involved too much. She said she did her part and the rest is up to us.”

“Sounds like her,” Dean mutters. Castiel doesn’t reply and they get back to the silence that makes Dean feel like a scolded little boy who has to go to his room right after dinner and not come out until he thought about what he did wrong.

There are a few things he’d still like to say. ‘Let’s go somewhere else’ is one of them. They returned to Blue Earth because Castiel isn’t done with his reading yet and the church offers shelter, but after seeing the place for what it really is Dean only finds it creepy. However, his complaint doesn’t seem relevant enough to bother and Cas probably would have ignored it anyway.

They left the horses right outside the church this time. Castiel sits on one of the benches that bear the names of those who had no choice but die for the cause and Dean sits a good bit away, on an unmarked one. He should probably get one of the journals, do some reading of his own, but he can’t summon the energy for it. Everything feels distant and unimportant, and yet he’s strangely restless and nervous.

He wonders if he should tell Cas of Michael and what he showed him. It doesn’t seem like a bad idea, except he doesn’t see what difference it would make and would rather not revisit the event in his story. So he keeps silent and ignores the nagging little voice that keeps telling him something is off. That Michael left far too quickly, gave up too easily. It seemed strange then, and makes Dean feel like he missed something.

It’s probably nothing, but Dean’s life – the one he leads now, though it probably also applies to the one he doesn’t remember – taught him how very dangerous it is to brush anything aside like that. Yet, there’s not exactly anything he can do about it. It’s not like he can ask Michael what that was about.

Or that he ever wants to see the asshole again.

Something might have come up. Something important, somewhere else. A battle to fight, a demon to torture. Maybe Michael’s loyal angels found something iinteresting and let him know just that moment; a village that is still standing, for example.

Or a soul that has been missing for too long.

“If anything happened to my brother’s soul,” he eventually asks because the thought won’t leave him alone. “Would you actually notice? Even if you’re far away from the hiding place?”

“Yes.” The answer is pretty monosyllabic, but it puts Dean at rest some. If someone had found the soul, Michael wouldn’t have hesitated this long, and Castiel certainly wouldn’t have kept silent if it had been taken.

“Are you sure?” Dean asks anyway – today, his mind just wants to torture him, it seems. “Is it protected somehow? Is there a magical connection or something? Or is this more a case of ‘I would notice because the world would end’?”

“I would know the moment it was discovered,” Castiel specifies, somewhat reluctantly. When Dean demands to know how, he merely presses his lips together and says nothing.

It’s somewhat typical. First he complains about Dean not caring about his brother enough, but when Dean wants to make sure the kid’s soul is safe, he refuses to hand out any information, as if Dean would run and rattle him out to the highest bidder the moment he can.

Okay, so his recent attempt to escape and make a deal with the enemies of mankind doesn’t look good, but Dean would have made sure he didn’t sacrifice any soul but his own there. Besides, that Crowley guy can’t be interested in Lucifer finding the soul any more than Dean and Cas are.

Not that he tried to use that argument in their discussion of the whole event – mainly because that discussion never happened. After Castiel’s well aimed punch that missed breaking Dean’s nose by half an inch, their entire dealing with the resulting issues was stuffed into hours upon hours of uncomfortable silence.

“So, this is helping you save the world?” Dean eventually asks, pointing to the journals. He’s meaning it as a ‘Hey, I still think your plan sucks but I fail to come up with something better so let’s hear about it’ peace offering, but Castiel only glares at him.

“No?” Dean challenges. “I thought this was supposed to show you how to crack purgatory and become powerful enough to kick Lucifer’s ass.”

“It’s complicated,” Castiel admits.

“Well, that’s vague.”

“It will work,” Castiel insists. “Once I get what I need for the ritual.”

“Oh, I knew it!” Dean tries to resist the urge to throw his hand in the air in gesture of frustration. He succeeds, but the frustration is still very audible in his voice. “I was thinking, why, if this makes you so damn powerful, didn’t anyone do it before? Lucifer, for example, who is after power and has a damn army at his command to get him whatever he needs. And the answer I came up with: Cracking purgatory makes you God, but it’s pretty damn impossible to do.”

Which is another way of saying ‘Your plan is useless’ and doesn’t help to improve the general mood.

But Castiel remains calm on the outside, even though he appears to be quietly pissed. “It’s difficult to do, but not impossible. Enina herself offered a detailed description of what to do and even left hints where we might find what we need. I believe she approved of my plan.”

“Oh, she knew you’d come, right.”

“Just like she knew her hometown was doomed.”

“And did nothing to stop it.”

“Judging by her notes, she didn’t know details of what would happen. Enough to know an end was coming, but not enough to warn anyone.”

“And you still assume it’s you she wants to support you here? Maybe she just realised how to crack purgatory and decided to write it down before she forgot about it. Like a recipe for pie.”

“It doesn’t matter, does it?”

“It does. Apparently you are the only one stupid enough to try.”

“It’s not common knowledge. And it… changes you. It will cut you off from all you once were, and many fear that.”

Jena mentioned something like that. But still…

“Oh please! As if anyone ever shied away from the price they had to pay for power!”

“Michael wants to play things by the book. And Lucifer has no love for purgatory. He still calls himself an angel full of pride and does not wish to change. Further, he is convinced he will be powerful enough on his own once he gains his vessel, and he might just be right.”

“Arrogance, then?”

“Partially. It was always his biggest fault. But also redundancy.” Acknowledging Dean’s questioning look, Cas says, “Look around you: There is only Michael standing between Lucifer and his goals of taking over everything. The remains of mankind are around because the devil allows them to be, for the moment. You think Michael will stop him he decides to destroy everything? So what would Lucifer do with even more power?”

“I don’t know. Smite Michael seems like an idea.” After all, it’s Michael who wants to play it by the book. Lucifer seems the more… pragmatic type.

But Cas shakes his head. “I don’t think he wants to do that.”

“Why not?”

“Because he’s his brother.”

Dean leans back on the bench that creaks under his weight. “Michael doesn’t seem to have such a big problem with that.”

Castiel only nods. “That has been their tragedy from the beginning.”

 

-

 

They stay the night in the church. Dean doesn’t sleep and neither does Cas. The fallen angel keeps staring into nothing long after he finished with the journals. So long Dean eventually asks him what’s wrong.

“The hardest part will be getting the blood of an inhabitant of purgatory,” Cas explains, though he doesn’t look at Dean and it seems more like he’s talking to himself. Also, Dean can’t imagine that’s what’s keeping him from sleeping.

“So we need to get the blood of a monster who died and went to purgatory, then came back?” Well, it does seem like a bit of a plan-killer right now.

But Cas shakes his head, still not looking at him. “Not all things in purgatory are deceased monsters. Some are native there.”

“And they come out?”

“Rarely.”

“Great. How does that help?”

“I need to figure out what to do with the soul.”

Huh. An unexpected change of topic. “What do you mean?”

“If I… change, it might not be safe anymore.”

“Because you might turn evil and destroy it?” That doesn’t sound good at all. Dean finds himself confirmed in his opinion that the plan sucks.

“No. It’s… complicated.” Castiel sighs and closes his eyes for a second. “I cannot explain it to you. Please don’t ask anymore. The problem with the blood might not be a problem at all. At least not a great one.”

“No? You happen to know a monster who might donate?”

“I might know one who already did. Even if not, there is a way of summoning them that… “Jena” explained to me.” Dean can almost hear the finger quotes.

“Oh, great. She can go summon one then. Bet they’re gonna love that.” If things go really well, the plan falls moot because the monster eats Jena and then fucks off without leaving any blood. Well, a man can always dream.

“It might not be necessary. We’ll see in the morning.”

That seems like a waste of time considering neither of them is sleeping. “Why not now?”

“Because the light is very bad.”

As usual, it’s impossible to tell when Cas is joking.

It is, however, very dark. Dean has to admit that. He can conclude from that fact that the possible blood must be hidden somewhere nearby because the darkness is no argument against starting a journey of a thousand miles.

Inside the church it gets even darker once Castiel blew out the single candle they had burning. It’s the kind of darkness that invites the mind to make up things. Steps here. Breathing there, slowly coming closer. The rusting of clothes brushing over the wooden benches.

Castiel remains perfectly calm. Maybe his mind isn’t out to play tricks on him. He is, after all, not human and maybe his senses only pick up things that are actually there.

Well. Dean’s subconscious may be as active as anyone else’s, but his instincts are better honed. He knows what’s real and what isn’t.

The little shuffling sound just on the edge of his hearing range is most likely a rat.

The stone walls of the old church project a sense of security few buildings can. Dean could probably sleep well here, if he could bring himself to try.

For a while he almost thinks it’s the prospect of meeting Michael in his dreams that keeps him awake, but something tells him the archangel won’t show up anytime soon. So maybe he’s just not tired.

Or he doesn’t want to revisit what Michael showed him in his dreams. His mind keeps circling around those images, and even though he knows with certainty they didn’t show the truth, it’s hard to let it go.

Strangely enough he wishes he could talk to Cas about it. The fact that Cas is the only one around might be a factor in that.

The fact that they are hardly on speaking terms right now keeps him silent.

Cas eventually does fall asleep. Dean hears his breathing even out and in the first weak rays of light falling in through the high, coloured windows, his companion is a motionless dark lump on a bench full with the names of dead people.

Until Cas snaps upright, just when Dean is on the brink of drifting off himself, and gasps, “Lucifer!”

At first Dean is convinced the angel had a nightmare. When Castiel grabs his bag and runs toward the door telling Dean to get moving, he realises that the danger is very real.

So Dean runs after him. The thought is back how Cas can even sense the devil nearby when he didn’t even sense Jena on the other side of a door, but it drastically loses importance as they push open the door and take in the world outside, dimly lit by the light of yet another dirty orange morning.

There’s no one waiting behind it. The town lies still, quiet and dead as it did before and for a moment Dean hopes Cas confused dream and reality after all. But the angel immediately takes off in a run down the street and Dean follows.

He doesn’t even know where they are going. There seems to be no plan to this; Cas is running in blind panic and Dean can only hope to keep up.

His thoughts are racing right along with him. Why would Lucifer show up _now_? What does he want? And how the fuck do they get away from him?

They run between the houses, keeping out of sight where they can, but after the houses there’s only open land waiting for them. So there’s only little comfort in the knowledge that with the sigils on Dean’s rips Lucifer can’t really find them the way he could find everyone else. All those sigils do right now is open the question of how he found them in the first place.

Jena must have told him, the little bitch! She’s the only one who knows where they are. Even Michael hadn’t known. Dean didn’t tell him and he never asked.

Or maybe they knew from the beginning because the angels did observe them all the time after all.

It doesn’t matter now. What matters is getting away, because Dean can’t imagine a meeting with the devil would go as smoothly as it did last time – at least not for Castiel, who last time rather left Dean behind to be captured than risk meeting the same fate.

They dive into the ruins of a burned out house and out on the other side. Castiel takes a moment to orient himself, then runs on towards the next hiding place. At least he seems to be sure of the direction and Dean wonders if he can sense where exactly in the town Lucifer is.

Another stop for orientation offers a welcome chance for Dean to catch his breath. “How…” he begins, and is cut off by a hand, hard as steel, wrapping around his throat.

He hardly has time to be surprised before the world whirls around him and he crashes into a hard surface. Hard but not unbreakable. It submits to the impact of his body and only after he crashed to the floor amongst pieces of broken planks does Dean realise that he was just thrown through the wooden wall of the building they used to hide from sight only seconds before.

The expected finishing blow doesn’t come. Dean tries to get up the moment he remembers how to open his eyes but he can’t move. Then the pain sets in.

Piercing, stabbing pain going all through him. Broken ribs, he identifies – but it’s more than that. His one mobile hand feels for his chest and finds splintered wood, sticky with blood.

He’s been impaled and he’s dying.

But even that doesn’t seem important now. His eyes seek Castiel and find him with his back against a wall, the hand of a tall, strong man in jeans and a leather jacket wrapped around his throat and holding him up off the ground with ease. Dean wouldn’t have to see the tell-tale signs of rotting flesh to recognize Satan.

“I got you!” the devil sing-songs and it’s odd that Dean can hear him so clearly even as it gets harder and harder to breathe.

And then Lucifer plunges his hand into Castiel’s chest.

Cas jerks and screams, but there’s no blood. It looks like Lucifer’s hand just goes in there without breaking anything. Then Cas says something that Dean can’t make out and Lucifer laughs an ugly laugh.

“Dean told Michael, and Michael told me. He has been getting really, really impatient lately - you can‘t imagine how happy he is we finally found it! Even if we had to have a little help.” He throws a glance in the direction of Dean and winks before turning back to Cas. “To be honest, I didn’t think the plan to let Dean go would take us anywhere. Guess I’ll have to hand one to my older brother.”

Dean wants to defend himself, wants to tell Cas that no, he didn’t tell anyone anything. But he can’t even gasp, let alone speak, and Cas is looking at him with agony and betrayal written all over his face.

Then Lucifer pulls out his hand along with a shining ball of bright light that may be the most beautiful thing Dean has ever seen. At the same time Castiel’s eyes begin to glow and a scream that doesn’t sound human in the least is torn from his chest.

The next thing Dean sees is an explosion of light that in its wake leaves a dark impression on the wall Cas is trapped against – an impression he’s seen before that makes him want to scream with breath he doesn’t have.

By the time the darkness swallows the rest of Dean’s world Lucifer has disappeared and the image Dean takes with him as he goes is Cas lying motionless on the ground beneath the shadow of his wings.

 

-*Interlude IV*-

 

_They were lucky, perhaps for the first time in years. Not only did Castiel see a grounded ship the moment they got in sight of the ocean, the large tanker was even more suitable than anything he had dared to hope for._

_Sam missed the glory of that sight, because he was barely clinging to consciousness and because Castiel had not told him what they were here for or what they needed. It was part of the ritual: for it to work, Sam couldn’t know anything about it. Not what Castiel would do nor what result, exactly, he was hoping for._

_Knowing that, Sam had never asked, in all the weeks they needed to find their way from Williamsburg to the East coast. He trusted Castiel, and that trust gave the angel hope when little else did._

_Their journey had not been easy. Castiel felt his own weakness, stemming from a long time of neglecting his own needs. He had hardly eaten since Teag first took Sam. And since getting him back he barely dared to sleep, holding constant vigil. He had only left Sam alone when he found a safe place for him to hide while Castiel left to find a demon and take his blood. Sam couldn’t keep down anything else and the withdrawal would kill him. Castiel couldn’t let that happen. He couldn’t let anything kill his friend. Not now._

_Withdrawal and attacking demons weren’t the only dangers. Sam was ill, the effort of the journey almost more than he could bear. He had no reserves left._

_While Castiel stopped to take in the sight of the tanker, Sam trembled with exhaustion against his side. He soon was shaken by another coughing fit that left him wheezing with blood on his lips. Only when his failing lungs had calmed down did he look up. He blinked between the stands of hair falling into his face, clearly struggling to make sense of what he saw._

_“We made it, Sam,” Castiel said and held Sam a little closer to protect him from the strong wind. He’d lose it soon, this warm presence at his site._

_“It’s a ship.” Sam’s voice was hoarse from coughing. He blinked again, letting his eyes wander. “How do we get over?”_

_Castiel didn’t know if his friend was aware enough to realise they were supposed to be on the ship, not just near it, or if his mind was so muddled by fever and exhaustion that nothing else made sense. It didn’t matter – either way, he was right._

_“The water is very shallow,” he said. “We can walk.”_

_“We’ll get wet.”_

_It was the fever talking. When he was clear-minded, Sam didn’t pay attention to such details._

_“It’s not far,” Castiel assured him. It wasn’t a lie if seen relative to the entire size of the ocean, but the ship was still a few hundred yards away from the shore and he had to hope there were no deep spots hidden beneath the surface. Sam was in no condition to swim._

_The way would be difficult enough even through shallow water. And then they had to get inside the ship. There was a large hole on ground level where much of the underside had been torn away, but even so, there might be climbing waiting for them before Castiel found the kind of place he needed._

_They rested for a while once they reached the water’s edge, but Castiel was too restless to let them linger long. He was worried, likely irrationally so, that something would attack them now, this close to their destination._

_The water was neither cold nor warm and shallow all the way, never reaching higher than their thighs. Yet, as expected, it was still difficult to walk through the water and the slick and Sam was breathing hard, making it only with Castiel’s support and on reserves he could only waste because there was no point in saving them for anything else._

_The ship was looming over them, getting larger the closer they came. A silent giant, relic of a lost time._

_They entered through the hole in the belly where Castiel left Sam waiting just inside, on the first dry ground they found, while he climbed up into the darkness that filled the ship beyond the thin light falling in through the hole. It took half an hour for him to find a way up and return to get Sam, but despite the rest he’d gotten in the meantime, Sam didn’t make it halfway up over the ladders and narrow stairs he had to feel for in the dark. There was no room for Castiel to carry him here and he needed both his hands to climb. So they had to take an extended break, and several more after that before they reached the upper levels where weak daylight could be seen at the end of a very long corridor._

_Fortunately the ship had never fallen to its side but only leaned to the left ever so slightly. Otherwise everything would have been that much harder._

_Castiel lifted Sam in his arms once their surroundings allowed it. His friend was too exhausted to protest. He was breathing far too fast, too shallow._

_He was dying, but that was okay. It was, for the first time ever, okay._

_Castiel would win this race._

_He found a room that was suitable after searching only for minutes. It must have been a canteen once: there was a large table surrounded by a dozen chairs, and everything else didn’t matter. Castiel gently laid Sam down on the empty table and began to move the chairs out of the way._

_Afterwards he took everything he needed out of his bag. Fortunately, the ritual didn’t require much – the only difficulty had been finding a knife with an ebony handle and a glass blade. Castiel had improvised in the end, as soon as he found ebony to work with._

_Broken glass was not exactly a rare thing to find._

_Beside the knife, he only needed chalk, a leather rope, four bouquets made of dry wood, and a dry place inside a large body of saltwater._

_Sam watched silently as he made his preparations. The chalk was used to draw symbols on the floor and the table. The wood bouquets were placed in every corner of the room, inside glasses Castiel found in the cabinets. The long rope he cut into four pieces with the knife._

_After he finished drawing, Castiel took the pieces of rope and used them to tie Sam’s wrists and ankles to the table. Sam’s eyes never left him while he did it, but his face remained unreadable. He never tried to stop his friend but willingly let it happen._

_In the end, Castiel set fire to the wood in the glasses and let it smother. It would take around ten to fifteen minutes for them to burn down completely, and only then would the ritual be completed. If it took less than nine minutes and nine seconds, it would fail, which in this case would mean all was lost._

_What followed was the hardest part. Castiel leaned over Sam, his hands wrapped around the handle of the makeshift knife so hard he could feel the symbols he craved into it dig into his palm. But his voice was calm when he looked into Sam’s eyes and asked, “Do you trust me?”_

_“Yes.” Tied to a table and faced with a knife, Sam’s answer came without doubt, without hesitation. Castiel nodded wordlessly. A lump in his chest made it hard to breathe when he set the first cut._

_He had to draw it out until the wood was burned down. Speaking was not allowed to him after the initial question. If Sam asked him to stop or he no longer trusted Castiel in the moment of his death, the ritual would fail._

_Castiel’s sense of time was as accurate as ever. The length of minutes was never subjective to him. Yet he kept one eye on the wooden bouquets and wished they would burn down faster. In a sense, the twelve minutes and thirteen seconds during which he carved up Sam the way the ritual demanded were indeed the longest he had ever experienced._

_Sam never once even screamed, though he couldn’t keep completely quiet as ancient symbols and random lines were cut into his skin deep enough to do permanent damage had he been meant to survive this. When the last remnants of the bouquets were but a glimmer at the button of their glasses, his eyes opened and he and looked up, panting and covered in sweat, at Castiel who tried to smile as he set the blade right over Sam’s heart._

_Sam’s body arched and shuddered when Castiel killed him, but he died without a sound. The ritual had worked. Castiel would have known it had even without the blinding light that filled the room for one second, was gone the next._

_Afterwards, the body on the table wasn’t Sam Winchester anymore. Castiel closed his eyes and waited until his hands were no longer trembling and breathing no longer hurt. He wasn’t sad. It was as if a great weight had been lifted off him and replaced with another that was much easier to bear._

_From now on, he had to hurry. Sam was gone but his soul had not gone to hell. Castiel had only little time before Lucifer or Michael would find this place._

_The final object in his bag was a bottle of holy oil. He emptied it over the body on the table and the rest of the room before setting it on fire with a match thrown from the outside. The fire would burn for a long time. It would destroy all evidence of the ritual and maybe even harm the body so much that Lucifer would be distracted for a long time by his attempt to set it back together._

_Soon, Lucifer would come here, and Michael would follow. Castiel hesitated for a long minute before he pulled an old ball pen out of his bag, and a journal that had been damaged by water and had little unfilled space left. He tore out one of the remaining empty pages and quickly wrote a brief message before folding the paper once and leaving it on the floor of the corridor where it would be found._

Dean, _the message read._ If you can see this, know that you do not need to worry. Your brother is safe. I live now only to protect him.

_There was not much point in it. Michael never let Dean’s consciousness surface, so Dean would never get the message. He never even knew what had been done to his brother for decades. Yet Castiel felt the need to do this, as if by telling Dean he turned it into a sacred promise that could never be broken._

_And perhaps he had to tell Dean because this should have been_ his _job. Dean should have been the one to put his brother above everything else, and Castiel would never, not even if Michael ever let him go, stop resenting him for the fact that he didn’t._

_Half an hour later saw Castiel walk through the shallow water back to the shore. He barely felt the wet clothes that clung to his skin or the wind that had grown colder. Instead, he was for the first time in years aware of the essence of Jimmy Novak that bound Castiel to this body he wore, now curled protectively around the fluttering, exhausted soul inside him. There was little of Jimmy’s consciousness left; Castiel didn’t know what kind of instinct made him want to keep Sam safe and protected but he was grateful, on Sam’s behalf._

_Sam could rest now. Castiel and Jimmy would keep him far under. If all went well, Sam would never be aware of anything again._

_Castiel reached the shore and turned North, a single line of footprints trailing after him as he walked on._ __

 


	10. Chapter 10

Awareness returns suddenly and without warning. Dean gasps and sits up, all senses alert and looking for a danger he knows is there, even if he can’t remember what it is.

Then the memory comes: Lucifer. Lucifer coming and killing Castiel.

Lucifer taking the soul.

Lucifer, who is very clearly not around anymore. Dean notices it though the all-consuming wave of loss that threatens to drown him. His lips form words he isn’t aware of. It doesn’t even seem worth noticing that he was dead a second ago and now he isn’t.

Numbly, he runs his hands over his body. There’s not a scratch on him, and no blood at all. He halfway expects to look up and see Michael before him, demanding to get back into his body, but then he does look up and only sees the ruined town, pieces of the wall he was thrown through and the wall against which Castiel died.

Dean gets to his feet. He’s shaking, but not in pain. Ridiculously, he’s hungry.

The dark shape of wings has been burned into the wall, letting Dean know that Cas is really dead. Seems like he had a bit of grace left, after all.

He’s also gone. Dean stares at the spot where his corpse should be lying and wonders if this is something angels do – some kind of Jedi thing that disintegrates their bodies after they die. Somehow he doesn’t think so.

Somehow, he also thinks that he should be covered in blood even if his wounds have been healed. Slowly, Dean’s mind starts working again. He looks around in growing confusion, sees nothing but dust and rubble, and when he turns back to the wall, the shadows of wings are gone.

“What the fuck?” he says.

“That was exactly my thought right now,” Jena answers. “I admit, I’ve been missing Lucy every now and then, but this was not quite the kind of family meeting I was hoping for.”

Dean turns around so quickly he nearly falls over and finds her standing right behind him, staring at the wall as if there was still something to see on it. “Where the heck have _you_ been?”

She graces him with a brief glance. “I didn’t feel like meeting Satan in one of his more murderous moods, so I decided to wait this one out.”

“You let him kill Cas!” Dean yells. “You let him take my brother’s soul!”

“No, Dean, _you_ did that.” Jena doesn’t say it with venom. In fact, she sounds slightly bored. “And Cas is standing right behind me.”

Surprised, Dean looks up, half-expecting to actually find Cas standing there and half-disappointed that he isn’t.

“This isn’t remotely funny!”

“I agree,” Cas says. He’s standing behind Dean, actually, and Dean is getting increasingly confused and increasingly angry.

But that is still better than mind-numbing desperation.

“What the Hell is going on here?” he asks.

“Well.” Jena unwraps something that Dean would have been sure was a lollipop if those hadn’t gone out of production centuries ago. She throws the wrapping carelessly to the ground and it is blown away by a gust of wind, a tiny, brightly coloured spot completely out of place in this sepia-shaded world. “Being one of the most powerful angels in creation has its merits.”

“What?” Dean asks because he’s not quite following. He looks at Cas for help but the angel stares right past both of them and looks so heartbreakingly crushed Dean almost feels like giving him a hug.

The feeling fades and is replaced by ice-cold horror when it sinks in what that look might mean.

“From a certain power level upwards it’s easy to bend reality left and right.” Jena explains, unconcerned. “Has always been a hobby of mine – though I have to admit some people develop disconcerting personality traits and go after you with stakes if stuck in a time loop for a few months. Anyway, long story short, what just happened wasn’t, strictly speaking, real. At least not all of it.”

“So Lucifer was never really here?” That can’t be – because it doesn’t make sense. Jena shakes her head and destroys any hope Dean might have had.

“He was. But he didn’t kill any of you – not really. I just made it for all of you that he did. And then I undid it.”

Dean thinks she must look proud of herself, but when he glances at her face to check, she’s unexpectedly, uncharacteristically sombre.

“What about the soul?” he asks but closes his eyes in defeat before she can answer because one look at Cas’ face is answer enough.

It’s Cas himself who confirms it. “It’s gone.”

Dean opens his eyes and fights the urge to wrap his hands around Jena’s scrawny neck. “If you’re so all powerful, why didn’t you save it?”

“Maybe you should think twice before speaking and be grateful I saved _you_!” Jena replies coolly.

“I don’t care if you saved me! But protecting that soul was what this was all about! Where’s the fucking point? You want us to be able to sit by and watch as Lucifer tears the rest of this world apart?”

“Yes,” Castiel says flatly. Dean turns and finds him staring unblinkingly at Jena, looking entirely defeated.

Jena sighs. “No,” she denies. “I couldn’t have protected it if I tried.”

“Why not?” Dean asks.

“Because Lucifer would have noticed. Believe it or not, but he’s better at these tricks than I am. The only reason it escaped him that he didn’t truly kill the two of you is because he was distracted by finally getting his hands on poor Sammy. If I had tricked him there as well he would have known at once. And then he would have seen through _all_ of it and killed the two of you for real and taken the soul anyway.”

It seems to make sense. Dean still wants to punch her. Or maybe he just wants to punch _something_.

“All is lost,” Castiel says in the same dull voice as before and Jena sighs.

“I know.”

“Hold on a minute,” Dean protests. “Are you actually giving up here?”

They stare at him now, as if that was a very stupid and not at all obvious question.

“There’s nothing we can do,” Jena points out.

“Of course there is! We’re gonna get my brother back.” Dean turns to Cas. “You saved him from Lucifer before, all alone. Why are you so sure the three of us can’t do that now?”

“Lucifer left him alone back then,” Cas explains. “He won’t do it now. And Sam is already broken.”

“No, he isn’t. He would have said yes before if he was.”

“I was there to prevent it.” There’s finally some life back in Cas voice, but it’s only desperation and growing anger. “I was when you weren’t! But now I’m not! Sam will come back to life and he’ll know that can only mean I’m dead and there is no hope. He can’t hold on any longer, he _can’t_!” The last words he’s yelling in Dean’s face in the most emotional display he has ever shown.

“Cas is right,” Jena says. “You probably won’t believe me when I say I’m sorry, but I am. The resilience Sam has shown was remarkable, but even he can only bear so much. Actually, I expected him to give up the last time I saw him.”

“The last time you did nothing to save him either,” Cas mutters bitterly, at the same time that Dean says, “But he didn’t. How can you know he will now?”

“Because Lucifer will make sure of it.” A hint of impatience is creeping into Jena’s voice, as if she just can’t understand why Dean doesn’t get it. “He’s not going to let him go this time and Sam has nothing to hold on to.”

“Well, maybe you’re not giving him enough credit.”

The punch comes out of nowhere, though maybe Dean should have expected it. He stumbles a step backwards and when he looks up, clutching his cheek, it is Castiel’s furious face he sees.

“Don’t you say that!” the fallen angel yells. “You, of all people, have no right to say that!”

“While I have a hard time disagreeing, I think you should calm down a bit, little brother,” Jena says sternly, putting a hand on Castiel’s shoulder that is shaken off immediately.

“It’s your fault!”Cas keeps screaming into Dean’s face. “I promised to protect Sam and you… you…” His voice finally breaks, but the tears in his eyes remind Dean of the look on his face just before Lucifer “killed” him. The betrayal. Lucifer’s words.

And suddenly it all falls into place. Why Cas could sense demons and Lucifer but no other angel. Michael’s sudden retreat after seeing into Dean’s head. After he connected the dots Dean couldn’t make sense of. Why Lucifer said Dean had betrayed them.

“I didn’t know,” he defends himself. “I swear, I didn’t. Michael… he appeared in my dreams and, and he was in my head. But I didn’t know… I didn’t even know where the soul was, and if I’d known I wouldn’t have told him!”

The anger on Castiel’s face mixes with desperation. “Why didn’t you tell me about Michael?”

All the explanation Dean can give him is a pathetic and tragically ironic, “I didn’t trust you.”

Jena snorts. “That’s actually almost funny. It could be, anyway, if it hadn’t effectively destroyed everything Cas and Sam have fought and suffered for. Congratulations.”

The words are not needed to make Dean feel miserable. But now Cas turns on his fellow angel.

“Dean didn’t know,” he snaps. “ _You_ did. You knew everything and you could have helped all the time, but you didn’t!”

This got Dean’s attention. “What?”

Jena looks entirely unimpressed. “You give yourself too much credit. So could I have helped? Maybe. But why would I? Everything was simply following Father’s plan. Remember that from destiny’s point of view, you are the bad guys.”

“And yet, you keep aiding us,” Cas points out. “I believe it is time you chose a side and did what you think is right.”

Jena throws a brief glance at Dean. “You know, someone told me that before. But somehow, that someone failed to set a good example.”

“Maybe Dean didn’t,” Cas says, as if there had been any doubt who she was talking about. “But Sam did. He never gave in, and yet you sat back and watched because someone else let you down.”

Jena sighs. “It doesn’t matter now, does it? Lucifer has Sam’s soul and it’s only a matter of time until he also gets his consent.”

“If he hasn’t already,” Dean mutters.

“He hasn’t,” Jena says. “I’d know.”

Dean lifts his head, an unexpected and painful wave of ridiculous hope running through him. “How so?”

“I’m an archangel,” she says as if that explained everything, which he supposes it does. Cas doesn’t react to the revelation – the archangel thing is probably another thing he knew and never mentioned to Dean. Right now, Dean doesn’t have it in him to feel bitter about that.

“So we can still save him,” he realises. “You’re a friggin’ archangel! You can just fly to wherever they are hiding and get him out.”

Jena’s face darkens. “Don’t be ridiculous. Even if Lucifer hadn’t protected the place from outside influence, he’d kill me before I got near Sam.”

“So you value your life above the world?”

“Yes, if you don’t mind, I do. Maybe it would be better to finally get this thing over with anyway. I just grew tired of waiting.”

“If that was the case, you wouldn’t be here at all,” Dean insists, though he can’t be sure of that, not in the least. “Or do you really want to sit back and let one of your brothers be killed?”

“Who are you to judge that?” Jena sneers, and she’s right, of course, but it still stings.

“No,” Cas suddenly says. “Dean is right. We should try. We _have_ to!”

“It’s hopeless,” Jena snaps impatiently.

“Even if it is, what do we have to lose?” Cas voice turns pleading, but there’s a hard edge to it that says he won’t accept No for an answer. “You wouldn’t have come if Sam hadn’t impressed you. He fought for us for so long. We owe it to him to return the favour.”

“You fought for him long enough,” Jena points out. “Let it go, little brother.”

Something inside Dean twists painfully. “I’ll do it alone if I have to,” he informs them. “Just tell me where to go.”

“Well, in that case, I hope you kept your horse,” Jena says dryly. “Lucifer’s in Detroit, and I’m pretty sure that’s where you’ll find your Sammy as well.”

The words resonate something within Dean, but he can’t grasp it before it sinks back into the black pool of nothing that swallowed his memory. Beside him, Castiel flinches.

“You only have to get us near there,” the fallen angel says coldly. “If you would rather return to passivity, we will go on our own.”

Jena looks at each of them for a long time. Finally, she sighs. “There is no cure for stupidity, I guess. But you’re right. What have we got to lose?”

 

-

 

When Jena transports them to Michigan in the blink of an eye, Dean is not only overcome by an unpleasant feeling of déjà-vu, he also curses the fact that they didn’t have her on their side sooner. The transport leaves him disoriented and slightly unwell for a moment, but it sure beats walking.

Or riding, as it is.

Michigan looks a lot like Minnesota, except the weather is worse. A fine rain greets them that would not bother Dean if it wasn’t accompanied by a soft, cold wind that wouldn’t bother him either if not for the rain.

There’s actually grass on the ground they land on, but it’s dry and dead and doesn’t improve the landscape at all.

“This is as close as I can get us without Lucifer sensing it,” Jena explains. Her face is set in an uncharacteristic frown as she looks over the bleak plain they have landed on.

The ground rises to the east, to the west there are small groups of bare threes in front of the darkening sky. In no direction Dean can make out the silhouettes of what once was a big city and he feels his heart sink. Lucifer will have so much time to break his brother until they get there.

Well, better get started then. Refusing to waste any time with desperation, he asks, “Which way to Detroit?”

Castiel points south. “It’s about sixty miles.”

Sixty miles. Dean tries to do the math but he doesn’t know what obstacles the landscape will have to offer until they reach the city. “Better get started, then,” he says and starts moving.

“Take these,” Jena’s voice sounds behind him not ten seconds later, and when he turns he sees her holding the reins of the horses they left behind in Blue Earth. The animals look confused and slightly pissed off, but don’t seem to have any noteworthy complaints about their sudden relocation.

As he swings into the saddle, Dean lets go of the last bit of hope he had that Jena might accompany them. He doesn’t like or trust her, but she’s pretty powerful and they are going to a city full of demons to face off the Devil. Some help would have been nice.

It occurs to Dean that they could probably do with a plan.

Well, they’ll have a while to come up with one, at least. He, for his part, doesn’t feel like delaying their departure so they can have a general discussion about what they’ll do when they get there.

As they ride on, leaving Jena behind, Dean has to restrain himself from making the horse go as fast as it can, knowing well enough that it won’t keep up a high speed for long. Still it’s hard; every minute they need could be one minute too long.

“You know, the problem with you is that whenever your brother is involved, you magically lose the ability to think,” Jena says as she rides up to their side on her own horse, which she either randomly stole from some stable or pulled out of her ass. Before Dean can say anything in his defence, she turns to Castiel. “But you! You’re supposed to be the rational one in this mix up. If only because somebody has to be. Just going in there won’t get you far.”

Castiel glares at her. “We will need to know what we are dealing with before we can make any plans.”

“Well, I can tell you what you are dealing with. Lucifer’s sitting in his den right in the middle of the city, playing with his favourite toy. And every part of the city that’s not his den is swarming with demons. And the moment they see you they will either kill you, or take you to Lucifer so _he_ can kill you. And if you through a miracle or two make it to Lucy after all, he will still kill you – but slowly, so Sammy can enjoy the show.”

“Thank you,” Dean snapped. “That’s really helpful.”

Jena sighed. “In other words, you’re going to die.”

“That’s better than doing nothing.”

“Your opinion.” Jena shrugs. “However, I do have a better idea. You could kindly ask for my help.”

“I thought this was as helpful as you could be.”

“No, this was as far as I can take you. However, if you go and get yourself caught, Lucy will know he was tricked and it won’t take him long to figure out who tricked him. So if a confrontation with my big brother can’t be avoided anyway, I might as well confront him head on.”

“Okay. Great.” Somehow, it always seems to come down to conflicts among siblings. “But what can you do?”

“I can, for instance, get you to Sam, distract Lucifer, give you a chance to grab Sam and get all of you out of there.”

Well. That sounds like a plan at least.

 

-

 

As Jena helpfully reveals far past the appropriate moment, Lucifer’s powers have formed a shield around his hideout that no angel or demon can pass through in flight, or teleportation, or by beaming or however demons call what they do. They can, however, walk through without hindrance – and as soon as they are inside, they can jump around within the parameter. Of course the moment they do, Lucifer will know. So the element of surprise is a somewhat important factor.

Then there is the issue of getting away. Once they have Lucifer’s vessel, Jena has to transport them outside as far as she can, they’ll once more have to run past the barrier which to Dean’s considerable worry is about a two hundred yards wide instead of the line on the ground he expected, and then, finally, Jena can transport them to safety – except a real safe place does not exist as long as Lucifer is after them.

That, however, is something they’ll only have to worry about if Jena’s still alive after they grabbed their target – and they are, too.

The weather gets worse as they are nearing Detroit. The wind picks up strength, as does the rain. The dry ground and everything plant-like that managed to survive in it are probably having a party, but for the three of them it means a long and miserable trip. Only Jena looks like the rain doesn’t even touch her.

Which, upon closer observation, it doesn’t.

Dean’s doing his best to nourish optimistic thoughts. At least on the way back they won’t need to concern themselves with stealth anymore. At least with so many demons around those will probably tear them apart between them before delivering them to Lucifer. (His mind actively ignores the fact that him, at least, Lucifer could simply bring back.) At least they don’t need to walk.

At least the awful weather distracts him from the sores he’s getting from riding.

He concentrates on that because it keeps him from thinking about his brother. About what’s happening to him right now. And how Dean is soon going to meet him.

Even on a mission to rescue the kid from the Devil’s clutches, Dean finds he can’t bear thinking about him. He also can’t stop thinking about him. Without the wind and the rain as a bother it would be driving him crazy.

Maybe it still is. He might arrive in Detroit cold, wet, and insane.

They arrive in the city at dusk, except that the sky, permanently covered anyway, is cloudy to the point that they can hardly tell when the night ends and the day begins. Considering how rarely it happened that the weather changed at all in the time since Dean’s return, he wonders if this rain is going to last for years.

As seen in other places, the outer parts of the city are empty. The three of them leave their horses behind when they reach the first buildings. Getting to the centre will take hours on foot, but the horses offer too great a risk of discovery.

In any other place, Jena could shield them from the demons’ attention. Not here. Lucifer would notice any use of angelic power within his territory.

The one good thing about the shield he erected to hide himself and keep out all other angels is that it also shields any nearing angel on the other side of the barrier from him. Otherwise, Jena wouldn’t even have come this close without him noticing.

He’s relying on his demons to warn him. Dean and the others won’t give them the chance.

Actually, it’s mainly the others who won’t give them the chance while Dean watches, because Cas and Jena have demon killing swords and he doesn’t. They hold their weapons tightly in their hands when they hear the first voices over the sound of rain and Dean stands behind them, feeling useless and grim.

The demons they finally see don’t seem particularly alert. There are three of them, sitting inside a windowless building. The weather is actually helping the intruders here, keeping everyone off the street. Even demons in stolen bodies don’t like being cold and wet – especially since new bodies are so hard to come by these days so they can’t simply go and change if they get soaked.

It doesn’t, in any case, look like Lucifer expects anyone to come and bother him and his newly rediscovered vessel. Otherwise the demons would pay better attention, the fear of their lord stronger that their distaste for the weather.

Castiel and Jena are in and out of the building almost too fast for Dean to see it happen, leaving bloodied, burned out shells behind. If the demons even had time to realise what was going on, no one had time to react, let alone send out a warning.

There are few more encounters along the way. In an empty building they find large, moth-bitten curtains which they wrap around themselves to keep off the rain and hide their faces. Someone seeing them in passing won’t know who they are and if a demon got close enough to recognize them, they would also get close enough to get a blade between their rips.

It happens once, an hour into their trip down the main street. It’s a pair of two that meets them, walking on the other side of the road and in the opposite direction. One of them suddenly lets out a surprised sound, and the next moment he’s dead, his companion in the body of a young girl following in less than a second. Jena and Cas are, if nothing else, an effective pair of killers.

 

-

 

Since they have to be careful, it takes them almost until evening to reach the magical line – which is absolutely invisible to the human eye, through Jena and Castiel can obviously see it. Once they crossed it Lucifer will know they are here. Everything has to happen very quickly after that.

“If we’re lucky, my aura will overlay yours and he’ll never even know you’re there until it’s too late,” Jena said when laying out the plan. The plan says she’ll have to distract Satan while Dean and Cas sneak around and hope not to run into too many demons, and then, after they found Sam, she’ll have to surprise her brother with a quick retreat that gets everyone out. They’ll then run through the barrier, carrying Dean’s brother between them because he likely can’t walk on his own and hope none of the surrounding and very alert demons is running faster than them. It’s no problem at all.

Dean can’t wait to start.

Naturally, he did consider the possibility that this is a trap and Jena is merely delivering Lucifer’s party entertainment. But in that case he couldn’t come up with a reason why she saved them in the first place – unless that wasn’t really her doing and she just showed up in time to get the praise. The thought won’t leave Dean alone but there’s nothing he can do but risk it.

Without Jena they wouldn’t even have found this place, let alone come this far, that much is certain.

Now there’s only this stretch of town right before them separating them from the guy who killed Dean and Cas the day before. And from Dean’s brother and everything he doesn’t want to face.

Dean looks down the street – empty, blurred by rain. Surrounded by buildings, one of which looks like it might have been a bank once. He’ll have no way of telling when they reach the other side of the barrier, except that once they do, Jena will grab him and spirit them away.

Beside him, Castiel stops as well, his face grim. He has said barely two words since they reached the city and Dean realises that of all of them, he has the most to lose. Lucifer hates him, after all. And he has no archangel whose vessel he is to bring him back to life or hand in a formal complaint if he’s being tortured for too long.

And yet Dean knows Cas would rather die horribly than turn back. He can see it in his face.

“Thank you,” he says.

Castiel throws him the briefest of glances. “I’m doing this for Sam.”

“I know. Thank you.”

They haven’t seen another demon in half an hour. A part of Dean constantly expects being jumped from behind because this is running much too smoothly, all things considered. He keeps thinking that the bodies they didn’t have time to really hide well must have been discovered by now, or that they’ve been watched from the beginning and the demons are just waiting for the right moment. Certainly Lucifer must know that they are coming? Maybe Michael was able to home in on Dean and has warned the brother he’s only helping in order to kill him properly.

The urge to turn around and look behind him every ten seconds stays with Dean all the way as they walk over the empty, open street towards their invisible goal, but he doesn’t give in. There’s no turning back anyway.

Dean’s heart is pounding wildly in his chest. He’s tense and the only reason he’s moving at a steady, level place is because his body can’t decide if it wants to bolt or rush onwards abandoning all caution.

 The part of the city they enter now feels even more deserted than the one they just crossed. Dean wonders if the demons have order not to get too close to their master and his toy or if they just don’t want to, but has no time to really think about it before a small hand touches his arm and he’s somewhere else.

He knows he’s moved because one second ago there was washed out, weakening daylight and now there’s not. His confidence in their plan is fading because obviously Jena has materialized them in a closet. There is a brief, fluttering sound that leaves the space right beside him empty in its wake.

A little further away, there’s movement. Castiel, shuffling quietly in the dark. Jena left the moment they arrived to face Lucifer and distract him, as according to the plan.

Now Dean and Cas can only hope that this place isn’t too big and too swarming with demons and fallen angels.

And that Jena had even the vaguest idea what she was doing when she dropped them. The fact that she managed to land them in this confined space as opposed to, say, a wall, makes Dean feel only vaguely optimistic.

Right before him, at his feet, there’s a glimmer of light falling through the gab between door and ground. Dean pushes carefully and finds to his delight that the door doesn’t creak. He also finds that there is no startled yell and immediate attack, so he cautiously steps out into the dimly lit corridor.

For the first time he becomes aware how warm it is in here. Not overly so, but after months spend in the chilly air outside and hours of walking through the rain it feels almost unnatural – even though it’s not warm enough to drive the chill out of Dean’s bones and only makes the wet clothes clinging to his skin even more unpleasant.

The corridor is empty and everything silent. If there are any beings here but Lucifer, it’s not a great number. Remembering his first, non-fatal meeting with the Devil, Dean suspects that he likes his solitude.

Or maybe he just doesn’t like to share his vessel. Except that, of course, he did, and often. Dean feels a rush of hatred run through him that hits him without warning and makes his hand tighten around a weapon that will, against everything they might find here, be completely useless. In fact, it’s just there to give his hand something to hold on to.

His feet scrap over a wooden floor. There is wallpaper on the walls and the corridor is lit by regularly placed lamps. With the power of a fallen archangel it can’t be too hard to power a building with no power being produced and no intact power lines either, but that doesn’t make it any less creepy.

The corridor with its multitude of doors reminds Dean of a hotel. Looking back to where he emerged from, he finds that Jena really did drop them off in a closet, albeit a giant one integrated in the wall. Castiel comes out of it right behind him, clutching his sword.

The two men share a look; Dean’s questioning glance is answered with a slight nod to the right. How Cas knows where they have to go, Dean can only guess at.

There are picture frames on the walls. Dean sees the pictures they display out of the corner of his eyes, but when he actually looks at them there’s only darkness.

They walk carefully, silently, but not slowly. Dean feels utterly exposed in the long, well lit corridor, but no one happens to run into them and all the doors remain closed. After half a minute he notices voices, just at the edge of his hearing range, coming from a room ahead of them. They are too quiet yet to make out the words, but he’s able to identify one of the voices as Jena’s.

Maybe Cas has heard them all along. His hearing _is_ better than a human’s, after all.

They follow the sound around a corner and down another, shorter corridor that ends in a large door. The voices are louder now but Dean still can’t make out the words due to them being in a language he doesn’t understand.

They are accompanied, just for a second, by a third voice letting out a low, cut-off groan. The sound is barely audible over the others, but it makes Dean’s blood boil none the less.

It sounds further away that the other voices and to the right when the others come from the left. Dean is well aware that opening this door might lead to him finding himself facing the Devil before dying a dreadful death, but he’d be damned if he’d let that stop him!

What he finds when he opens the door is an almost unrealistically large room. It’s divided into smaller parts by half-walls and heavy curtains but no doors. There are large windows on the opposite wall and the room is richly furnished. Dean wonders if all of this was created by bending reality like Jena did, and if it matters.

Though he can hear the voices of Jena and who can only be Lucifer very clearly now, the angels remain unseen behind several layers of heavy cloths which subsequently serve to hide the two intruders from view. Another groan turns Dean’s attention to the right and it’s like an unseen force is driving him onwards, around a corner and –

Another voice, saying just a few quiet words, stops him just in time. There’s someone else in there, and he very nearly walked into them, ruining everything.

If he needed any proof that without the soul of Lucifer’s vessel riding shotgun in his own Castiel’s not a handy demon-detector anymore, this is it.

Dean risks a careful peek around the corner. There’s a king-sized, impossibly comfortable looking bed a good bit away from him. The soft blankets and pillows are soiled with blood, though – not much of it, but enough to turn what would have been an elegant sight into a disturbing one.

A man is lying on the bed, and another man is sitting beside him, obscuring the view on the lying man’s face. Dean identifies him anyway as the guy whose body he saw when he met the Devil in Georgia, recognizing the clothes. Or what is left of them.

The other man is sitting with his back to the intruders and doesn’t seem to notice them. He has one hand pressed to the other’s forehead while the other is lifting an emaciated hand that is lying limply in his grip. He suddenly speaks, but it’s directed at the vessel and Dean doesn’t understand the words.

The answering whimper is the only indication that the man on the sheets is even awake. Dean’s knuckles are white from gripping the knife so hard. The useless, fucking knife – he’ll have to let Castiel go first and make all the kills, hoping he’ll be able to do so quietly.

Even so, Lucifer will probably sense it. Their mission was pretty hopeless to begin with, and for a second Dean feels overwhelming despair. It’ll all have been in vain. They will die, Lucifer’s vessel will give in and nothing of it would have happened if Dean hadn’t given in first.

But there’s no point in wallowing in guilt right now, and no time for it, because Cas is already springing to action.

He tugs at Dean’s arm as he sneaks past him – just a brief touch, but the message is clear. Dean is supposed to follow, and even though he only sees higher risk of discovery and no point, he does so.

The demon on the bed turns in the very last moment but has no time to react. The movement only leads to Cas’s blade, already striking down, to hit him in the neck instead of the back.

He has no time to scream, but there is no way anyone, let alone Lucifer, could miss the blinding white light that busts out of his body and forces Dean to avert his eyes or lose them. So this was an angel, not a demon. Dean gets no time to marvel on it very much. He knows now why Cas wanted him to come along, knows that every second matters. Still seeing dark spots dance in front of his eyes he lunges forward, towards the bed, knowing only that he has to reach it, right now.

He doesn’t. There’s an angry voice yelling, then something explodes. Castiel has abandoned his sword in order to lift his friend off the bed but the force of the explosion knocks them down. Dean only narrowly avoids getting hit by a piece of closet and he sees Cas lose his hold on his fragile burden as they are thrown through the room, lading hard on a wooden floor that catches fire like bone-dry straw and rolling a few feet before lying still.

Dean is with his brother in a second. He doesn’t notice the ringing in his ears, the singed skin of his hands, or Castiel trying to get back to his feet. He doesn’t even notice himself moving. One moment he’s trying not to fall on his face, the next he’s pulling a skeletal body into his arms.

“Sammy,” he says, or maybe he screams it. He can’t even hear himself _think_ over the feelings that rush through him and the fact that Sam’s body is jerking in his arms and then goes limp, his eyes fluttering shut after meeting Dean’s for less than a second.

“Sam!” Dean tries to gently shake him and pull him closer to his own body, and this time he’s sure he’s screaming. Then something rushes into him from behind and there is only darkness.


	11. Chapter 11

Eventually, Dean wakes up and he’s not dead. He isn’t even in much pain and realises that it must have been another of Jena’s reality-warping illusions. But where did it start? Did the first one ever end? And what about…

The moment he thinks of Sam, his body shoots upright and pain shoots through him. Confused, he looks down at his hands and finds them wrapped in remotely clean bandages; only his fingers are visible, showing first degree burns. Then he looks up and finds he’s sitting on a makeshift bed made of blankets and a thin mattress. Around him are intact, if bare, walls and above him a ceiling.

He’s alone.

And then he isn’t. Dean tries to climb to his feet, driven by the urgent need to _move_ despite the pain piercing through his right leg and his feet get tangled in the blanket, causing him to fall over and shake them off in near-panic, as if the room were on fire or there was someone he needed to save. The door opens just when he gets free, revealing Castiel with a bandage around his head and his left arm in a sling. He stands in the door and watches passively as Dean struggles to get upright.

“What happened?” Dean asks. He remembers an explosion and pain, maybe a bleeding wounds on Cas’ forehead but he wasn’t paying attention and he remembers so much more.

Leaning over he nearly throws up. But he doesn’t. He’s breathing hard, though, barely hearing and at the same time hyperaware of Castiel’s words.

“Jena got us out. Lucifer tried to stop her.” The fallen angel’s voice is dull. He sounds defeated, as if it all didn’t matter anymore. Dean remembers Sam going still in his arms.

Gall splatters to the ground at his feet. He’s not wearing shoes, he absurdly notices. His feet are bare.

His blindly reaching hands find a wall and he leans against it, slowly regaining his balance. “Where’s Sam?” he asks, then closes his eyes in anticipation of the answer.

“Down the hall. With Jena.”

Dean’s eyes fly open. The information that walking really fucking hurts and he can’t breathe only reaches his brain when he’s halfway down the hall, and his brain doesn’t care. There’s a carpet under his naked feet now, old and faded, and more doors to the sides, but Dean walks past them until he reaches the last one, pushing it open before he has a chance to brace himself for what he might find.

What he does find is Sam lying flat on a bed with Jena sitting beside him, one hand on his forehead and one holding his wrist. She touches Sam like the other angel, the one hurting him has done, but Dean only stares at Sam’s chest until he can make out the barely notable rise and fall.

Dean’s brother is white as a sheet and obviously deeply unconscious. His cheeks are sunken in and his eyes surrounded by dark rings. His face is covered in small cuts and bruises. Probably the result of the explosion – they look random, unintentional.

His torso is wrapped in bandages that are soiled with blood. The hand Jena is holding is also bandaged, the other arm fixed in a makeshift splint. Dean is almost glad the rest of Sam’s body is covered by the blanket.

Wobbly legs carry him over to the bed, but he stops just short of touching Sam - even before Jena sharply says “Don’t touch him!”

Dean looks up, suddenly filled with desperation. Now he is forbidden to do so, he wants nothing more than wrap his arms around his brother and hold him close, even though Sam looks emaciated and so fragile Dean thinks he might break at the slightest touch.

Just like Castiel’s and Sam’s, Jena’s eyes are bloodshot and the easy confidence she displayed earlier is all but gone. Slowly, she pulls her hands off Sam’s forehead but keeps her hold of his wrist.

“He’s badly hurt,” she explains.

Dean sits down on the edge of the bed, careful not to touch the broken body under the sheets. He is unable to stand any longer and feels like throwing up again. Or maybe passing out.

Or shooting himself in the head.

“What happened?” he asks hoarsely.

Out of the corner of his eye he sees Cas standing in the doorway, his arms folded across his chest and leaning against the doorframe, looking weary. Watching the scene without participating in it.

Jena leans back, her small hand still clutching Sam’s wrist. Dean wonders, distantly, if there’s a meaning to that.

“When you killed the angel and I flew over to you, Lucifer knew he wouldn’t be fast enough to stop us from getting to Sam before him. That’s when he decided to blow the place up and kill Sam – and us as a bonus. Well, the two of you, at least.”

“So even if we managed to take away his body, he would have held on to Sam’s soul and kept it in Hell until he gave in,” Castiel completes the explanation.

Dean looks back at his brother. If they’re very quite he can hear the soft rattle of breath in his lungs. “Is he dying?”

“That remains to be seen,” Jena says.

Dean closes his eyes. If Sam dies, Lucifer will never let him go again. Everything will have been in vain.

Tentatively, he reaches out and touches the splinted hand after all; just a brush of skin against skin. The explosion didn’t happen that close – obviously, Lucifer’s aim was off, or he didn’t manage to get done before they made it out. Much of Sam’s injuries have been there before.

His brother’s skin is hot and dry. “He’ll make it,” Dean mutters.

“That’s not a given.”

“Yes, it is.” It’s Sam. He can’t have held on for so long only to give up once Dean is back. He wouldn’t do that to his brother. Dean knows that now.

He leans forward and retches dryly, but there’s nothing left for him to bring up.

“I would appreciate it if you didn’t vomit in here,” Jena says sourly. “We’re gonna be stuck here for a while.”

Her words make Dean look up and for the first time take in his surroundings. The room has bare walls and someone’s had the brilliant idea of hanging a carpet where he suspects it covers a window. There are cupboards, but they are all empty. The room he woke up in (where he _did_ throw up), if he recalls correctly, doesn’t have any window at all, and while the doors in the corridor are all closed, none of them seems to lead outside.

The place smells old, like something used for a long time and then abandoned for just as long.

“Where are we?” he finally asks.

“In a safe place,” is all Jena says. “On stretch of land you probably never set foot on before.”

“How is this safe?”

“I’m protecting it, for instance. And it’s covered in arcane symbols that protect me from being discovered while shielding it. Awesome, isn’t it?” Her smirk comes across as something of a sneer. “Anyway, it’s pretty important that you don’t open any doors or windows.”

“There’s no food.” It’s not the first thing that’s on Dean’s mind but the first thing he hears himself say. “How’s this helping Sammy, if he’s going to starve here?”

“I’m taking care of that,” Jena assures him vaguely. Not a satisfying answer, but Dean’s curiosity only goes so far when his head threatens to explode any moment.

“Why aren’t you healing him?” he asks quietly. “Because Lucifer would detect it?”

“No. I’m doing what I can. But it’s not much.”

“Why now?” Dean feels bitterness and anger rise through the haze of guilt and desperation. All the feelings inside him need an outlet, but he’s too worn out to summon even the energy to snap at her. Therefore he sounds just tired when he says, “You’re the fucking archangel Gabriel. You can wrap reality around your finger – why is it so hard to heal a few cuts and bruises?”

“And broken bones, internal bleeding and life-threatening infections,” Jena completes the list. “I saved him from the worst, meaning his death is no longer inevitable. But that’s all I can do. Much of his wounds aren’t even new. They’ve been carved into his body through the work of decades. By the Devil. There’s only so much I can do. Lucifer decided not to heal him completely until he says yes, and he is the only one who could.”

Dean feels like he’s falling. Right now, he just wants the two angels to go and leave him alone with his little brother.

“So,” Jena says, her voice softer than before. “You remember then.”

It’s not a question and there’s no point in replying. Dean only looks down and tightens his hold on Sam’s limp hand. He doesn’t even remember everything, but now that’s only because he actively refuses to think about it, too aware that the moment he does it will crush him.

There’s a thud coming from the door that has Dean look up and find Castiel lying on the floor. He doesn’t move.

“Aw, damn,” Jena curses. It’s a pretty tame expression for what Dean would be feeling if that was _his_ brother.

As it is, his brother might by dying and his concern for his friend pales considerably in comparison. He doesn’t even have it in him to feel bad about it.

Maybe later. When he’s done feeling bad about everything else.

Right now he barely understands what’s happening as Jena leaves her place at Sam’s bedside to kneel beside her own brother and touch his forehead.

“He’ll be fine,” she says after a second. “He just needs rest.”

“Do take care of your brother, then,” Dean mutters as Jena gathers the much taller man in her arms and carries him off without any effort. “I’ll take care of mine.” Now he knows there’s nothing terribly wrong with Cas he feels almost grateful for his collapse, as it effectively gets rid of the two angels.

He does feel a little bad about that. But only for a second. Then he turns back to Sam, runs a hand through his hair and tries his hardest not to think.

 

-

 

Sam’s fever climbs steadily as the day moves on. He never stirs. At some point, Dean falls asleep and when he wakes up, he believes for one long, terrible moment that his brother has died, before his shaking finger find the weak, erratic pulse under the thin, hot skin of Sam’s neck.

He goes to search for Jena then and finds her in the next room where she’s sitting in an old armchair with her eyes closed. For a second Dean is convinced she must have fallen asleep, but her eyes open the moment he enters the room.

A nod towards the narrow bed on which Castiel is sleeping tells Dean to keep quiet. The girl who is actually an angel and used to wear a male body the first several times Dean met her follows him out of the room and into Sam’s without a word.

She checks Dean’s brother over quickly but in the end shakes her head. “Nothing I can do right now. It’s down to the traditional methods.”

“I see.” Dean looks around. “We don’t happen to have a bathroom in here?”

“Third door to the right.”

Dean doesn’t even ask if there’s running water – there’s electricity as well, after all. He finds towels and a jug which he fills with cold water from the tab and carries it back to the room, where he sits down to gently cool the heated skin of Sam’s face and neck.

“Why didn’t you heal Cas?” he asks, his eyes never leaving his brother’s face. “His wounds are no personal love bites from Satan, are they?”

“No. I could heal him. But as long as we’re in here not only am I protected from detection, I’m also effectively cut off from the powers of Heaven,” Jena explains. “What power I have I need to keep up the shielding and keep Sam alive. Castiel’s wounds aren’t serious, mostly he’s just exhausted. He’d probably bitch if I wasted energy on him.”

She says it matter-of-factly, without any hidden fondness or remorse, and Dean is reminded that in the big family of Heaven, these two hardly even know what the other looks like. Or at least Gabriel, the almighty archangel turned Trickster, certainly didn’t know Castiel, the heavenly henchman before he turned traitor. There is no deep, brotherly bond between them. It reminds him that Jena is here just for her own interests, but he’s too tired and distracted to try and figure out what those interests might be.

She leaves before the nightmares start. Dean is almost glad for them because a Sam who tosses around, however weakly, is better than a Sam who might just as well be dead for all he moves. Then Sam starts whimpering and crying out which breaks Dean’s heart and makes him try to wake his brother, sooth him, do anything to make it stop. He’s never been able to watch him cry.

Then Sam starts calling for Dean in this thin, broken voice that’s barely there and Dean’s heart does something in his chest that can’t be put into words.

Through it all, he does his best to bring Sam’s fever down, to make him drink and keep him as comfortable as possible. The first time he pulls off the blankets to wrap cool, wet towels around Sam’s legs, he nearly starts crying himself.

Sam’s legs are both splinted. What Dean can see of his flesh through gaps in the bandages is swollen and discoloured in some places, black and purple in others. He needs to ask Jena how bad it is later. Right now he just… can’t.

They don’t even have anything to give Sam for the pain. Dean can only hope Jena’s able to do something about that, even if she can’t heal him.

Sam whimpers again when Dean pulls the covers back up, and Dean can just barely make out his own name. “Shh,” he makes, leaning closer to his brother and stroking his hair. “It’s okay. I’m here. You know that, right? Sammy?”

Sam doesn’t answer. His head falls to the side, away from Dean, as he sinks back into a deeper unconsciousness where nothing can reach him.

 

-

 

Dean reaches his first low at some point in what he calls night because of the quietness that surrounds him with Sam deeply unconscious and neither of the others anywhere to be seen. There’s no light falling in through the windows. They might as well be in another dimension and Dean won’t rule out that they are. It adds an air of unreality to the place that seems to crush down on him and makes his thoughts constantly circle the one thing he does not want to think about.

He remembers everything. He remembers his mom and how losing her felt. Remembers putting all his faith into his father and all his responsibility into watching Sammy. He remembers hunting, and Sam leaving, Dad disappearing, Dad’s death, and Sammy’s. He remembers thinking nothing worse could ever happen when Mom died, being proven wrong when Dad died and then the terrible mix of denial and growing horror inside him when Sam slumped lifelessly in his arms.

Deep down inside he had known that very moment what he was going to do. His first instinct was finding a way to fix this. He never even tried to deal with the loss because he couldn’t face it.

And as much as it pained him to admit it later, everything would have been better if he had. Better for the world. But most importantly, better for Sam.

The thought leads to another one, and another, until everything has run through Dean’s head and left him a crying, trembling mess.

The only thing that keeps him from losing it completely is the fact that while he has all those memories in his mind, he knows that not all of those memories are real. Michael must have messed with them, like he did before Lucifer found them. Because there are things there Dean knows he wouldn’t have done. Even if it makes so much sense in his memories, he knows it can’t be true.

At the same time, all these new memories hand him the final proof that the memory Michael tried to leave in his brain about raping Sam couldn’t have been true – because Dean’s memory ends the moment he says Yes, and even if the events leading up to that moment can’t be entirely genuine, he knows Castiel was right when he said Michael kept Dean’s consciousness so far under that he never had the slightest awareness of what was going on.

There’s nothing. Nothing at all. And if there had been something, anything at all that indicated Dean was in the least okay with what Michael was doing, the manipulative bastard would have let Dean remember it.

What this leaves him with is confusion, uncertainty and in result an inability to finally fully face his guilt and remorse over what he has done and how horribly wrong it all went. Everything inside him is a disconnected mess, as if those memories belonged to someone else; another Dean this one barely knows. It’s not so much that he can’t pick out the bits that are wrong as that he can’t decide what’s right, because everything feels wrong to him. Alien.

 It makes Dean feel sick, and wanting to scream, and yet it is all still held back, leaving him unable to let go.

Sam is ill, hurt, maybe dying. Sammy’s gone through Hell, suffered more than Dean could imagine even with his own memories of Hell intact, and that is all Dean’s fault. Of this, at least, there is no doubt.

And yet Sam keeps whimpering Dean’s name in his sleep and the fact that Sam must have seen him before he passed out is, ironically, the reason why Dean knows he’ll keep fighting.

The whole situation is wearing him down, yet he can’t sleep. His own thoughts won’t let him, which goes against every instinct he has: there’s nothing to do, no reason to stay awake. He needs sleep and should get it while he can so he’ll be rested when he needs to be. But knowing that doesn’t help in the least.

When he finally drifts off into a half-awake haze, his thoughts get away from him and leave him with confused and terrible dreams.

He’s woken after what feels like minutes for all the rest he got and days for the horror that accumulated in his mind. What wakes him is Castiel opening the door and entering with a basket hanging off his arm. Like a fucking flower-girl in a meadow.

“You should eat,” he says without preamble, putting the basket on the desk beside Sam’s bed. It’s too high for Dean to look into from his position, but he suspects the basket contains food.

His stomach seems to think that food would be great, but the thought of eating makes him feel sick.

“Not hungry,” he says. His stomach growls in protest, but Cas only shrugs; he probably couldn’t care less if Dean starves or not.

The fallen angel has changed his clothes into something Dean hasn’t seen before, so he guesses Jena provided for it the same way she provided for whatever’s in that basket. Cas is still pale and looks like he could use more sleep, but he also doesn’t give the impression of planning to get some anytime soon.

Which is stupid because there can’t be any more to do for him than for Dean.

Then he comes over and sits on the edge of the bed, opposite Dean. He places a hand on Sam’s forehead to take his temperature and then two fingers on the side of his neck to measure his pulse, and Dean is reminded that he did this for decades, that he took care of Sam longer than Dean has even known his brother.

The realisation is followed by the irrational urge to shove Cas off that bed and tell him to fuck off. He doesn’t, because it’s not the right reaction to show to the guy who kept his baby brother more of less alive in his stead, but the jealousy remains where it is, gnawing painfully away on Dean’s insides.

But he pulls himself together and only says, “He hasn’t woken up yet.”

“I didn’t think he would.”

Dean doesn’t like the way Cas says that – it doesn’t sound like he didn’t think Sam would have woken up yet, but like he doesn’t think Sam will wake up at all. Once again, Dean wants to kick him, but before he can snap a reply, Cas says, “You have to eat something. We might be stuck here for a while.”

Dean knows that. The moment they leave the protection of this place, Lucifer will be able to track them down, so they can only get out when Sam is up to being constantly on the run. Even without the illness and the internal injuries, that will take weeks. Sam’s legs, broken in several places, make sure of that.

“No doubt about it,” he agrees. “Sammy won’t be going anywhere anytime soon.”

Castiel hesitates with his reply, so long Dean starts to glare at him. “Spit it out.”

“Sam might not wake up. Not as himself. If he dies, Lucifer won’t let him go before he said Yes, so the moment he he’s gone, we have no choice but to abandon him. You should sleep and feed yourself, so you will be up to it should we have to run.”

“Don’t be an idiot! Sam’s not going to die. You heard Jena – his wounds aren’t lethal anymore.”

“They’re not longer _inevitably_ going to kill him. He’s still heavily injured, and very ill,” Cas reminds him, calmly and mercilessly. “There is no guarantee he’ll make it. You’ve witnessed the nightmares he has. He might simply give up.”

“He won’t!” Dean’s fingers close around Sam’s limp hand – carefully despite the agitation he feels. “This is _Sam_ we’re talking about. I didn’t give him enough credit back then, but you’ve been with him all this time and you should know that he’ll keep fighting. He’s been trying to get me back for decades.” And it hurts to think of that, guilt crushing Dean like a collapsing building. “Do you really think he’ll give up now I’m finally here?”

“He might not even know that, Dean,” Cas says softly. “I think he passed out before he understood what was going on. For all Sam knows, I’m dead, you’re Michael, and there’s no hope. He’s all alone, Dean. With Lucifer.”

“No.” Dean shakes his head in denial. “Sammy knows I’m here. He’s been calling my name.”

But Cas doesn’t look convinced. He just sighs and for the first time looks at Dean with something like pity in his eyes. “He always called your name, Dean.”

It should make Dean feel better, should tell him that no matter what, Sam still counted on him on some level. But it only makes him want to cry.

He has to look away and when he looks up again, Cas is gone.

 

-

 

Jena makes herself scarce. She can’t leave any more than the others without giving away their position so Dean has no idea what she’s doing all the time, but he doesn’t really care either. It’s not like he went looking for her. In the end, he only leaves Sam’s room to go to the bathroom.

Without light from the outside it’s impossible to tell how much time has passed. After a while the walls begin to drive Dean crazy. He feels irritated and restless, yet too worn out to do anything about it.

He does eat, eventually – not because he thinks that Cas is right and Sam will die on him, but because he needs his strength to take care of his little brother. Like he’s always done. Like he was always _supposed_ to do, anyway.

Dean has no illusion that re-dressing Sam’s wounds, putting cool cloths on his forehead and changing his sheets is going to make up for his fundamental failure, but it’s something he _can_ do, so he does it.

Sam doesn’t wake up. He never opens his eyes. Days pass, maybe a week or even two and Sam only moves when he’s tossing in his nightmares. Dean manages to feed him some fluids at least but he needs food and it’s not as if they have an IV in here. Apparently Jena’s powers reach their limit there, which is a pity; a respirator would have been nice as well, since Sam’s breathing sounds laboured at best, ratting and wheezing on the worse days.

His fever doesn’t go down notably, but it doesn’t seem to climb any further either, which is something, at least. Dean sits and holds his hand whenever he can, talking to him all the time. Letting him know he’s here, waiting for Sammy to come back to him.

Hoping he can reach him, somehow.

Whenever Jena comes in, she sits beside Sam for a while, holding his hand and feeling his forehead, but if she’s actively helping him or simply monitoring his state, Dean can’t tell. He only knows that Sam doesn’t wake up.

The memories Michael left him with make him sick. There are some he can identify easily as fake simply by knowing he would never actually do what he remembers doing, but even those feel deceptively real and Dean doesn’t know where the line runs. He’s had some fucked up thoughts on the way to Michael, that much is certain. The only question is _how_ fucked up.

He asks Cas about it, eventually, after a long time of thinking on little food and less sleep. That day he’s sitting on the bed with Sam in his arms, having lifted his brother’s head and shoulders ever so carefully off the mattress so he can better hold on to him. Dean does that for himself as much as for Sam. After so many years of separation they both need the closeness.

“Hey Cas,” he says. “Tell me everything you know about me. Everything that happened in the time we were friends.”

Cas looks confused. He hasn’t lost that particular expression, and Dean finds that strangely comforting. “I thought you remembered.”

“I do. But some of it is wrong. I think Michael messed with my memory and now…” Dean stops and laughs a little, though there is no humour in it. “Now I’m not even sure which of the bullshit I remember I actually need to feel guilty about.”

“Try everything,” Cas says dryly. “You can’t go wrong with that.” But then he meets Dean’s eyes and takes pity. “Very well. Why do you think Michael manipulated your recollection of events?”

“Because he did it before. When I met him just before Lucifer found us.” New guilt washes over Dean at that, though in all fairness no one can blame him for accidentally letting Michael know something he didn’t even know himself. Fairness plays no part here, though, because he can always blame himself, and should. “He tried to convince me that I… did something he did by making me remember doing it.”

“Do what?”

Damn, couldn’t Cas just let that go? “He made me remember raping Sammy, okay?” Dean snaps. “He made me _remember_ …” His voice breaks and he has to look away. His arms tighten their hold around his brother as if they could somehow shield him from all the terrible things that already happened to him. Cas, mercifully, doesn’t comment on it.

“I knew that wasn’t true the moment he did it, though,” Dean says as soon as he trusts his voice enough to speak. “And now I remember other things that can’t be true either. But it all feels so disconnected. I can’t grasp it as long as I don’t know which parts are wrong, and how it really happened.”

“Why would Michael put fake memories into your mind?”

“To make me feel awful about myself and more likely to believe things the way _he_ presents them, I guess.” Dean shrugs. “At least, that’s what he tried before. He thinks he can make me see things a certain way if he makes me believe I thought so before.”

“And he made you believe you raped Sam?”

“No!” Dean hisses angrily. “He tried to. But I know I didn’t because I know I’d never do anything like that, least of all to Sam. Just like I know I wouldn’t throw myself at Michael for the promise of him getting rid of my brother for good!”

Castiel seems to freeze in his movements. “What?” he asks.

Dean runs a hand over his face, feeling drained. He doesn’t like revisiting his memories, fake or not, because they make him feel like there are ants in his brain eating away little chunks of him – but at the same time he has to talk about it before he explodes. And he needs certainty.

“According to my memory,” he says, “I went to Michael and told him he could have me if he promised in return that he would kill Sammy. For good. And then he did – he made me watch so I’d know he kept his promise and it was…” His voice breaks but he doesn’t care if he’s sounding pathetic. The memory plays out in his mind once again, down to the horror and relief he felt simultaneously as Sam died before his eyes, screaming and convulsing as blood poured from his eyes and ears and eventually his mouth, choking him. “It was horrible, but Michael said it had to be, to make sure Lucifer couldn’t bring him back. It’s the last thing I remember before waking up in the middle of nowhere.”

Cas is silent for a long time. Long enough for Dean to worry. So long, in fact, that when he speaks his words don’t really come as a shock anymore. “That is what happened,” he said. “You thought Sam saying Yes was inevitable, so you asked Michael to make sure he couldn’t be brought back.”

Dean closes his eyes and instinctively holds his brother even closer. “How can you know that?” he whispers. “You weren’t even there.”

“Sam told me. Later.”

Dean barely hears him. His mind is full of terrible pictures, all the more painful now he can no longer deny they are true. He remembers Sam’s agony and his body going up in flames before he even stopped moving. Remembers that his last thought was that now, at least, it was over for both of them. He could let go and leave the world to Michael.

“You…” Cas is clearing his throat in that awkward way he copied from humans not knowing what to say but feeling they have to say _something_. Dean wishes he just wouldn’t. “You meant well,” Cas tried. “You thought you were keeping Sam safe.”

“I watched him get burned alive,” Dean chokes. “Just so I could run away.”

Cas doesn’t say anything to that. He must have had his own thoughts about what happened and Dean is very sure that they weren’t as favourable as he pretends right now. All he does say, when he stands up and turns to leave the brothers alone, is, “Sam understood.”

It doesn’t make anything better. Dean buries his face in Sam’s hair and screams.

 

-

 

The worst about everything is that Sam was there. He was present when Dean said Yes, looking at him like a kicked puppy because he had been so sure that Dean wouldn’t in the end. He had had so much faith, in fact, that he gambled all the world on it and Dean will never again forget the look on his face the moment Dean let him down.

He’d nearly taken it back, then. Sam’s faith in him had very nearly been enough to replace the faith Dean didn’t have in either of them. But in the end he looked away so he didn’t have to meet his brother’s eyes when he said, “There’s one condition.”

And the last words Sam ever heard him say were Dean demanding of an angel to kill his brother and make sure he could never come back. Because Dean would rather see him die horribly than trust he wouldn’t destroy the world.

What terrifies Dean is how much sense it all made at the time and how absurd it seems now. Maybe things would have been different if Michael had kept his promise. Sam would have gone to Heaven and eventually Dean would have joined him, and all that would have been left of his betrayal would be the fact that he spared his brother further suffering and saved half the world.

But Michael didn’t keep his promise, he merely kept Dean’s consciousness in blissful oblivion so he would never learn that he himself revived Sam the moment Dean was gone. Looking back it is unbelievable that he would trust an asshole of an archangel more than Sam, who’d made mistakes but always meant well.

In the end, Dean can’t even pretend his anger at and mistrust in Sam had been anything more than a convenient excuse to give up and blame someone else.

He spends the next hours, days or weeks in a haze. It feels like weeks, but Sam hasn’t starved yet and neither has Dean, so it must have been hours. His brain doesn’t work right, though, and his emotions are a mess. “Your way of dealing is not exactly natural,” Jena says at some point, and the moment she speaks is the only moment he realises she’s in the room. “There was no ongoing development that led you to a point of revelation. It’s all jumbled in there, with giant gaps in your emotional progress. It’s hardly surprising you can’t deal, I get that. However, as long as you don’t, you’re useless. So how about you just pretend it was someone else who fucked up and get moving again so we don’t have two coma patients to take care of?”

Her concern is touching and her advice bullshit. Dean quickly forgets she exists as he tries to come to terms with how apathetic he was to his own fate, and Sam’s.

Holding his brother’s limp hand, it does feel like another person, another life. But it wasn’t.

Regardless, Dean gives in and starts eating again; not much but enough to keep him going so he can take care of his brother. Sinking into guilt and depression isn’t going to help anyone, but it takes effort not to do it. It’s so, so hard – but Dean has a lot to make up for and for once he’s going to actively work on that instead of just feeling bad about himself and leaving everyone else to deal with the mess he caused.

He’s going to do what Sam did.

And he can only hope that Sam will ever know.

 

-

 

Eventually, Dean falls asleep. It takes days, or so it seems, and when it happens he crashes hard, sleeps so deeply not even a nuclear explosion or an angry archangel would be able to wake him.

He wakes up filled with horror and a vague memory of pain. The feeling is instantly familiar – he recognizes it as the wake of a dream about Hell, one of the merciful ones he doesn’t fully remember. For a moment, while he waits for his rapidly beating heart to slow down, he longs back for the days when he couldn’t remember anything and these dreams had no meaning.

A second later he feels guilty about that.

Dean’s limbs feel almost too heavy to move and despite the terrors of his dreams he has a hard time pulling himself back to wakefulness. What makes him jerk fully awake, in the end, is the realisation how deep his sleep was, and worry about all the things that might have happened without his notice.

His back screams in protest when he moves, but Dean ignores it until he assessed his surroundings. Unsurprisingly, he finds himself in Sam’s room, half lying on the bed, half on the floor. Sam is lying before him and with every breath Dean can hear a soft rasp he can’t make himself pretend is just snoring.

The air is stale, smells of sweat and long illness. It tells Dean that they have been alone for a long time because somehow the air always gets better when Jena was there. The girl is like a freaking air freshener, which is the least she can do in his opinion, after forbidding them to ever open the windows.

“No.”

The whispered word comes so unexpected that Dean flinches and his heart leaps. He quickly grabs Sam’s hand, but his brother’s eyes are still closed. He’s covered in sweat and trembling, shows no sign of waking.

It’s not the first time Sam’s been speaking in his sleep, but it’s the first time he’s said anything other than “Dean.”

He’s having a nightmare, that much is clear. Not the first one, and all Dean can do is shake his brother ever so gently and hope to reach him somehow.

“No,” Sam whimpers again, and “Please,” and “Don’t.”

For the first time Dean is glad he doesn’t say his name between all of that.

“It’s okay, Sammy,” he mumbles, stroking his brother’s hair. They need to wash it, he thinks absentmindedly. Sam’s always hated having his girly hair be dirty. He’ll feel terrible when he wakes up like this.

At the same time he wonders what horrible memory Sammy is reliving in his dreams, and if Lucifer would know and come if he said Yes in his sleep.

He’ll have to ask Jena – she’ll know.

Dean still doesn’t know what to make of her. She’s never done anything to help him or his brother back in the day, when she ran around in a male vessel and pretended to be a trickster god who liked to kill people. And later she stood by and watched everything bad that happened happen without ever trying to interfere. The fact that now, all of a sudden, she discovered her good heart and wants to support them is suspicious, but so far Dean has seen nothing that indicates betrayal.

She’s the only reason they are still alive and Sam is still himself, and it doesn’t sit well with Dean that he’s dependant on and indebted to someone whose agenda he doesn’t know.

He should ask her, but he knows her replies will be pointless. He should ask her if she can do something about Sam’s nightmares, but Dean’s brother has already calmed down again and he doesn’t want to leave him to someone else. Especially someone he doesn’t trust.

Castiel Dean does trust. Now his memories are back much of the information the fallen angel kept from him makes sense, even though Dean still doesn’t like how things went down. It’s hard to keep a grudge against anyone but himself at the moment, though, so Dean just drops the whole thing. He doesn’t want to have discussions of any kind right now, anyway.

And no matter how he looks at it, there can’t be any doubt that Cas really cares for Sam and would never do anything to harm him. Not recently. Something between them changed in the time Dean was absent, and he still has enough sense to get that his absence had everything to do with it.

He’s still not over feeling a little resentment. When Cas comes in and feels Sam’s pulse and temperature, pulls away the covers to gently wash his sweat-covered body with a damp cloth and just tells Dean to “Go take a shower. You smell,” Dean wants to push him away and tell him that yes, Dean fucked up and he doesn’t deserve Sam’s love anymore, but he’s the one who raised the kid and stuck with him through the pile of horseshit that was their life, while Cas was the one who judged him for having been fed demon blood as a baby and smashed Sam’s faith in Heaven upon their first meeting.

He doesn’t. He goes and takes a shower instead.

The water is cool but not cold. It feels awesome on Dean’s skin and reminds him that this is the first shower he’s taken in two hundred years.

He can’t really enjoy it, when everything that feels remotely good makes him want to cry.

Cas is still there and sitting with Sam when he returns. Dean can’t even complain – it’s not like the angel has been particularly obnoxious these past few days. Mostly, he’s left the brothers alone and kept to the other end of the building, only showing up to bring food or to accompany Jena and hear her latest assessment of Sam’s condition.

So Dean owes him for one more thing, and bitching about his presence isn’t the way to go.

“How are you doing?” he therefore asks instead of what he feels like saying when he slips back into his clothes. “You look better.”

“I heal quickly,” Cas explains without much emphasis in his voice. “My injuries were not serious.” After a long, awkward pause he asks, “How are your hands?”

They ache, but until now Dean hasn’t paid attention to them. Sometimes, when holding Sammy, he noticed the red and blistered skin on his fingers but the sight never truly registered in his brain. Dean got rid of the bandages ages ago because they were in the way.

Now he looks at his burned hands, for the first time really seeing them. They look better than he thought. The skin is still burned, still overly sensitive, but it’s healing. There’ll probably be scars that could have been avoided with some antiseptic cream and attention, but Dean doesn’t give a fuck.

The red, tender skin reminds Dean, suddenly, of the handprint burned into his shoulder and what it meant. He and Cas had something, once – some bond that went beyond friendship, beyond the mere gratitude for having been saved, and Dean mourns its loss.

“I’m sorry,” he says. It hardly covers what he wants to say, but neither would anything else.

Cas nods and doesn’t say anything.

After a minute, Dean moves to open the door to the corridor, letting in some air that’s old and dusty but still better than the air in the room. He wishes he could open a window.

He wishes Sam would know he’s been saved. That Dean is back and sorry, and so fucking proud of him.

The thought that his brother might die and be lost returns with unexpected force. It makes Dean leave the room, and since he can’t get out and run until he vomits his lungs onto the dirty ground, he goes to look for Jena who could make the air a little more breathable for his brother, if nothing else.

The place is still small, and Dean doesn’t quite know why he expected it to have miraculously gotten bigger. Perhaps because the time he spent alone with Sam felt so long that he thought Cas and Jena must have been somewhere, done something. But there’s only the one corridor and six doors leading from it: Sam’s room, the room Dean first woke up in and the room Jena put Cas in after he collapsed. Then there’s the bath right beside Sam’s room, a small storage chamber stuffed with rubbish and a large kitchen that Dean has looked into but never entered. Jena is in none of these rooms and Dean can’t explain where she’s gone. She might be hiding from him. Stranger things have happened.

The lights in the corridor are always on. They’re bright enough to almost resemble daylight and keep Dean from going completely crazy. Cas’ room, on the other hand, is mostly drowning in shadows, with only a small, dim light bulb providing some illumination. Like the light in the corridor it doesn’t have a switch to turn it off. Only the light in Sam’s room and in the kitchen can be turned on and off. The room they placed Dean in when he was unconscious and the bathroom are always well lit.

The arrangement seems random. Dean is pretty sure that this whole place isn’t, strictly speaking, real, but he can’t for the life of him figure out why Jena would have chosen this design if she made the house up out of nothing.

Or where she fucked off to.

He’ll have to ask Cas, then. Dean returns to the room at the end of the corridor and stops in the doorway. Cas is sitting on the bed, having pulled Sam up to his chest and stroking his hair ever so softly. Dean can tell he isn’t holding him like this for the first time and his chest aches at the sight.

Sometimes he wonders if it wouldn’t be better for everyone if he just went away and left them to themselves.

Perhaps it is good that he can’t leave without Lucifer finding them, because no matter how much he feels they don’t need and want him, in the end it would just be another form of running away.

Besides, Sam wants to get him back, for whatever unfathomable reason. It would be cruel to keep that from him after he fought for it for so very long.

Cas looks at him and Dean wants to leave again. He is about to do so when Sam stirs.

Sam stirred every so often in the past few days, but this is different. This isn’t a toss of the head or a listless movement of his fingers. This time, Sam lifts his less injured hand as if to reach for something and groans.

Then he opens his eyes.

The room is much darker than the corridor. Dean knows he should come closer, should stop being just a silhouette in the doorway, but he can’t move.

Sam will think he’s Michael, he suddenly realises. He’ll think that Lucifer’s big brother came to join in the fun.

Again.

Sam looks directly at him. Dean can tell even in the shadows that fill the room. He’s waiting for panic, and sure enough Sam’s eyes fill with tears.

“Dean,” he whispers, breathes the word entirely without voice.

Dean is with him a heartbeat later and he knows he shouldn’t – Sam can’t know this is him, he’s just calling out his name. Dean is going to scare him. But he can’t help himself. His hands reach out for Sam against his will and he pulls him out of Castiel’s arms – carefully, carefully – and into his own. Waits for the screaming, the struggling.

Sam sobs into his shoulder and lets his thin, broken body sink against his brother’s. “Dean,” he breathes again. “Be real.”

“Yes, Sammy, I’m here, it’s me, really me this time,” Dean babbles. “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry. Got you now, Sammy. Gonna stay, just hang on. So sorry…”

Sam’s far too weak to hold on to Dean with his one good arm but Dean can feel him shift and try anyway because this is Sam and this is what he does. He holds on to his brother, no matter how hard it is.

All Dean can do is hold him closer so Sam doesn’t have to.

He barely notices Castiel leaving them alone.

 

-

 

Sam doesn’t stay conscious for long, and less than an hour after he first sobbed his brother’s name, Dean already doesn’t know anymore if it really happened or if he dreamt the whole thing after exhaustion finally knocked him down without him noticing. Sam is lying still and limp in his arms, filling this silence in the room with the rattling sound of his breathing. His skin is still dry and hot and Dean doesn’t know. Maybe it never happened.

He isn’t yet desperate enough to ask Cas, but he might.

Jena comes in eventually and checks Sam over. He’s doing better, she says, but the frown on her face doesn’t sit well with Dean.

What feels like hours later, the nightmares start again. Sam starts tossing and struggling against Dean’s hold, and Dean tries to keep him still because Sam’s hurting himself but his well-meant attempts only makes his brother struggle harder. Then he starts screaming for Dean, over and over, in a desperate, broken voice, and Dean pulls him close and says, “I’m here, I’m here.”

Sam jerks and opens his eyes. He’s staring right at Dean but his eyes are wide and scared, full of confusion. When he tries to move away, Dean’s heart breaks but he let him go.

Sam’s breathing hard and he looks like he might start to cry any moment. He looks so lost and hurt that Dean wants nothing more than pull him close again. It takes all his will not to and his hands are balled to tight, tight fists.

“It’s me, Sammy, it’s really me. Michael let me go.” He feels tears prickling his eyes and doesn’t care. “God, if there’d just be a way to prove it to you…”

Sam’s breathing speeds up – Dean fears he’ll start hyperventilating soon. He doesn’t know how awake his brother even is. Sam just woke up from days of unconsciousness in a haze of fever to a place he doesn’t know and something he probably didn’t really expect to ever see again. He must think this is a dream, or a trick of Lucifer or Michael, or Hell…

“It’s okay, Sam,” Dean says roughly. “I’ll give you some space. Take deep breaths, okay? Calm down, I won’t hurt you. No one’s gonna hurt you ever again.” He turns to the door that is inconveniently closed and calls for Cas, accepting that the angel is the more comforting sight right now – no matter how much it hurts.

Stepping back is the least he can do for Sam.

Cas appears within seconds. Maybe he heard Sam scream despite his lack of voice, or he’s been waiting behind the door like a creepy stalker. Dean doesn’t care, being able to focus only on the way Sam flinches when the door opens, and the way his eyes widen even more when he recognizes his friend.

“You are safe now, Sam,” Cas says gently, sitting down beside him, and there’s no satisfaction for Dean in seeing Sam flinch away from him, too. He aches for his brother, and he can’t help him.

Castiel doesn’t seem bothered by the reaction at all. Dean wonders if he’s used to it. For the first time he thinks about what state Sam might have been in every time he returned from Hell.

Sam struggles to sit up, weak as he is, with broken legs and only one arm that’s remotely useful. He shouldn’t, Dean thinks; not with internal injuries and so many fractures. He shouldn’t because he’s too weak and in too much pain, but Cas reaches out to help him, and Dean quickly places a few pillows behind his brother’s back so he can lean against them.

“Don’t worry,” Cas says calmly when Sam makes a sound disturbingly like a whimper. “We’ll just help you sit. That’s all.” True to his word he withdraws his hands as soon as Sam is settled and moves out of his personal space.

Sam’s eyes travel from one to the other, not trusting them, or not trusting his own perception. His good hand clenches around the covers and he’s covered in sweat. Dean can see his panic growing as he is overwhelmed by things his confused mind can’t take in. First Cas killed him, and then he was being tortured by Lucifer and his lackeys, and now he’s with Cas again and Dean is sitting right before him.

It would probably be easier on him if only Cas was around, because that’s something he is used to, at least. The logical conclusion is easily made but difficult to accept.

Castiel, obviously, comes to the same conclusion. “Dean,” he says quietly, throwing him a look.

Dean clenches his teeth and wordlessly leaves the room.

 

-

 

When Dean returns to Sam’s room an hour later, his brother is asleep again and Cas is sitting vigil at his bedside. Sam looks a little better, though: his face not quite as pale, his sleep not quite as restless. There are tear tracks on his face but he looks a little more peaceful than before.

This is what Cas has been able to do just by being there. All Dean managed to accomplish was giving his brother a panic attack.

“Did you say anything?” Dean asks in a low voice, sitting in the chair before the desk. “Does he know what’s going on?”

Cas hesitates with the answer. “I’m not sure,” he admits. “Sam is exhausted and sick. I don’t know how much he understood of what I told him, but he seemed calmer when he drifted off.” He, too, is keeping his voice low, so Dean assumes that Sam is indeed asleep rather than unconscious this time.

Dean doesn’t reply. He’s only just beginning to understand the multitude of problems he is facing now Sam is conscious again. He wants to have a proper talk, with Sam awake and listening. He needs to apologize, explain himself, ask for forgiveness – but at the same time he dreads that conversation like nothing else.

Maybe Sam won’t forgive him. Dean certainly doesn’t deserve forgiveness, and when he thinks how little effort he had made to forgive Sam after he freed Lucifer for much less selfish reasons, he can’t imagine Sam feeling anything but disgust with him.

The fact that his brother fought so hard to get him back has nothing to do with it. Back in the day, before he said Yes, Dean also needed to know Sam was safe and felt responsible for him, even though he didn’t want him around.

It’s almost impossible to imagine that now, not wanting Sammy; not needing to have him nearby and shelter him from forces that had used him from the beginning and weren’t done with him yet.

Cas pulls him out of his thoughts eventually, with a quiet, “You need to eat something.”

“I’m not hungry.” It’s true – the mere thought of eating makes Dean’s stomach revolt.

“Regardless of your emotional state, your body needs sustenance,” Cas insists. “Sam is going to need you healthy – that is, if you intend to take care of him.”

There’s no venom in his voice, but Dean can hear it anyway. He doesn’t deserve any better, really. Last time it mattered, his idea of taking care of his brother was to ask someone else to kill him.

He has the chance to do better now, though, and in reply to Cas’ unvoiced question he leaves the room and heads for the kitchen, where he finds a plate with sandwiches inexplicably waiting for him. He grabs a few and an equally inexplicable bottle of soda and moves back to Sam’s room, where he takes one sandwich and hands another to Castiel.

The angel takes it without comment.

They sit in silence for a while, but eventually Cas leaves again. It’s then that Sam wakes up and Dean isn’t sure if it’s curse or blessing, if he finally gets to connect with his brother or if he’ll have to call for someone else again because his presence makes Sammy flip out.

But Sammy only looks at him, and okay, his eyes are brimming with tears, but they’re not wild and wide and Dean supposes that a little crying can be excused every now and then.

“Hi,” he says.

“I thought it was a dream,” Sam whispers. “It wasn’t, right?” He sounds so doubtful that Dean’s heart breaks and makes him instinctively reach out for his brother’s hand. Sam doesn’t flinch away but returns the pressure with a desperation that overcomes his physical weakness.

“No, Sammy, it wasn’t. I’m here now. I’m so sorry.” His voice breaks. Sam lets out a strangled sob and Dean just wants to pull him into his arms, but that would hurt him so he can’t.

He can only watch and eventually begin to panic when Sam’s sobbing turns into a cough that doesn’t seem to stop.

 

-

 

When Dean finds Jena in the kitchen and tells about the cough so she’ll check Sam over again, she just rolls her eyes. “No point,” she says. “The disease is deeply settled and won’t go away. There’s nothing I can do.”

“He nearly vomited his lungs out there,” Dean protests. “What, we’re just going to wait until it gets better on its own? Or until it kills him? Did you forget that the magical healing finger of death won’t do him any good if Lucifer won’t let him go before he said yes?”

“What part of ‘I can’t heal him’ didn’t you understand?” Jena sounds irritated and not concerned about Sam at all. “I’m not refusing just to annoy you, moron.”

“Even death wouldn’t heal him,” Castiel suddenly says. He doesn’t seem interested in elaborating, though.

Dean doesn’t like it at all. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Sam has been sick for a long time. I don’t know if Lucifer can’t heal his illness or if he simply doesn’t want to, but so far it never disappeared and I don’t think it will."

This doesn’t get better. “But it’s just like a chronic cough, right? It’s not like it’s going to kill him. You said he’s had it for years…”

Neither Cas nor Jena answer for a long minute. Dean is ready to murder someone when finally Cas says, “It _has_ killed him before, when he was already weak due to other causes. There’s a risk it will happen now as well.”

Sam is weak. Dean gets that. Centuries of being dead and a day of being tortured on top of being pretty banged up to begin with will do that to a guy. “But the circumstances are different,” he observes. “He’s not sleeping in a cave this time. It’s warm here, there’s food and water and we’re taking care of him.” There’s food Sam can’t eat and it’s not like Cas didn’t take care of him before, but Dean refuses to believe that the house and Jena’s help are all for nothing.

“You’re right,” Cas says to his incredible relief. “Sam seems to be recovering and we won’t have to put the stress of moving on him before he’s ready. He has better chances than ever before.”

It’s what Dean wants to hear right now. It’s time to leave and go back to Sammy, he decides, before he has a chance to worry about the look Cas shares with Jena and what it might be they’re not telling him.


	12. Chapter 12

For a while after Sam woke up, not much changes. Dean’s brother is still weak and sick. He sleeps a lot, and even when he’s awake he can’t do anything but lie on the bed and hold on to Dean’s hand as if he was afraid his brother would disappear again if he let go. He doesn’t speak much because speaking hurts and costs strength. Dean is happy to do the talking for both of them and rambles on about nothing important until Sammy falls asleep, after which Dean falls silent to listen to his breathing.

He never speaks about anything important. There will be time for that later, although Dean is aware that maybe he should make use of the opportunity while Sam can neither argue nor run away.

For now, they all continue to be stuck in the weird little building Dean isn’t even convinced is real in any sense of the word, and they will continue to be until Sam’s broken bones have mended and his infections have been defeated. Dean will stay here forever if it’ll keep Sammy safe, even though after having been locked in here for what feels like weeks he’s willing to murder someone (figuratively speaking, or at least someone other than Sam) just to get outside for five minutes and take a walk that’s longer than the length of the corridor. Even opening a window would help.

Sometimes he wonders if Jena created this place as some kind of sadistic but subtle torture.

If so, the torture is meant for him. Jena herself and Cas don’t seem to have a problem with being locked in and Sam doesn’t even know. He asks were they are once, but is still so weak that the answer “Somewhere safe” is enough for him. In a way he reminds Dean of the little boy he used to be; the child who needed his big brother’s protection and trusted him without question.

It’s one of the worst realisations he’s ever had.

Apart from the fact that Sam is awake every now and then, the only difference from before is that Dean is taking better care of himself now. He’s eating more, and when Sam is out he often ends up falling asleep beside him. His brother needs him, and Dean has been too close to his own point of collapse before. He needs to be strong and healthy to be of any use. Also, Sammy would worry. Because he is a stupid little fool who doesn’t realise that some people simply aren’t worth his concern.

Since Sam woke up, Jena air-freshens the room more often so the air isn’t stale and smelling of sickness anymore. It annoys Dean a little because it seems to prove that she didn’t care enough about him and Cas to regularly bother before, but it also makes him happy because it shows that she cares enough about Sam.

Well, she should. After all, she invested a lot of effort into saving him and keeping him alive. She still comes regularly to check on him and support his healing process, though it frustrates Dean that there seems to be so little effect.

“Can’t you fight it down?” he once asks when Sam is coming down with another fever and tossing around in the grip of nightmares that don’t even leave him air to scream. Jena only grimaces, a faint sheen of sweat on her forehead, and replies, “There’s something much worse I have to fight, if you don’t mind,” though she never explains what that would be.

She’s never around when Sam’s conscious, making Dean wonder if there is anything between them he doesn’t know about or if she simply doesn’t want to confuse the kid. Sam’s already dealing with a lot, and if they did not meet in the time of Dean’s… absence, then the last time Sam encountered this particular angel, it wasn’t exactly on the best terms.

Through all these days, Cas doesn’t show up all that often. Dean suspects he must come in when they are asleep because half-eaten food disappears, water bottles are refilled and once he woke up covered in a blanket he didn’t remember taking himself, and he just can’t see Jena doing that for him. Actually, he’s not sure how he feels about Cas doing it, because, seriously, that’s kind of creepy, in a stalker kind of way.

Except he’s pretty sure Cas doesn’t stay out of sight because he’s creepily obsessed with Dean. It’s more likely that can’t really stand to be in the same room with him. They have a lot to talk about and if Cas is as keen on that as Dean is, they never will and it will stand between them forever.

Who is Dean kidding? It _will_ stand between them forever, no matter how often and how deeply they deal with it. What Dean did is not something a conversation can take care of.

Mostly, Dean doesn’t even think about Cas. When he does, he feels guilty – without Cas, he wouldn’t have made it this far and Sammy would have been lost long ago. Still, it takes a few days before he even notices he hardly sees the angel anymore.

A part of him is glad. It’s the part of him that shrivelled into something painful and ugly when Sam first woke up and panicked at his sight. Cas had Sam for centuries and Dean feels excused for wanting him for himself for a little while.

 

-

 

Without clocks or windows it’s hard to tell the passing of time, and Dean’s sleeping rhythm is shot to hell. He tends to sleep when Sam does, but Sam sleeps almost all the time and Dean only ever grabs a few hours in between. Or maybe he sleeps for days. He can’t tell the difference but he never feels like he just woke from a coma.

After what Dean somewhat randomly estimates to be about a week after Sam first woke up, he very carefully unwraps the bandages around Sam’s splinted legs to change them and check the state of healing. Fractures like Sam’s should take six weeks or more to heal and Dean is pretty sure that’s not how long they have been here, but the more he thinks about it, the less sure he is. Though it doesn’t really matter, in the end – Sam’s miserable state might be slowing the healing, Jena’s support might speed it up. Only one way to find out.

So Dean unwraps the bandages and finds the legs they covered discoloured in places, blue and purple in others. There are angry scars, but at least there are no bones sticking out through the skin.

Sam winces in his sleep whenever Dean touches his skin, no matter how careful he is. With a sigh he accepts that it will be another few weeks before Sam will walk on these legs again.

They are so thin Dean wonders how he ever walked on them in the first place.

Cas comes in when he is mostly finished and watches in silence until Dean has pulled the covers back over his brother’s shivering form. The fever is bad today, leaving Sam constantly trembling.

The fallen angel doesn’t seem to have any particular business with them today. He just watches, and then he turns to leave without a word, but Dean calls him back because this is his chance to figure out the time thing. “How long have we been here?” he asks.

Castiel actually has to think before he answers, and when he does, it’s with “I’m not sure. Time passes strangely here. Perhaps three weeks, maybe more.”

“Well, that’s useful,” Dean growls, disappointed.

Cas looks like he would like to glare but can’t be assed to make the effort. “I’m sorry I can’t be of more use for you.”

“Never mind. “ Dean turns away to reach for the damp cloth currently draped over the edge of the table and run it over Sam’s face again.

When he looks up after a minute, he finds that Cas is still there, staring at them.

“You’re still here,” he observes.

“Is that an inconvenience to you?” There’s something sharp and biting in the other’s voice that makes Dean frown.

“Be my guest.” He shrugs. “But it might help if you told me what you want.”

“What I want?” Cas echoes. “I can’t be here without a reason? Do you remember that I care for Sam, too? Or did you think that after I took care of him through all the suffering you put us through I should step out of the picture and leave him only to you now you had the grace to come back?”

Dean flinches. He didn’t see that coming. “Of course not,” he snaps back, though a tiny part of him wants Cas to do exactly that, if only for the moment. Just until Sam is well and aware enough to connect to Dean again and he no longer has to think at every moment that Sam spent so much more time with Cas than with him. “But you didn’t seem all that interested in his state until now, so I thought you didn’t care.”

“That’s because you are so focused on yourself that you are blind to everything else,” Cas lets him know. “I do care, and I will keep an eye on Sam until he is better and beyond.”

 _‘He doesn’t need you anymore,’_ Dean very nearly tells him. But he would have regretted that as soon as he said it, so it works in his favour that Sam stirs in that moment, gasping softly for air. He coughs once and falls still again. Dean immediately runs a hand through his tangled, greasy hair, acting on instinct. He hears the door fall shut when Cas leaves but doesn’t look up.

 

-

 

 

Sam has to ask about Cas, of course. He does it basically the moment he opens his eyes and for the first time fully takes in his surroundings. “Where’s Cas?” he wants to know, with a fearful undertone as if he were no longer sure if seeing the guy before hadn’t been a dream. Well, at least there is some consolation in the fact that it’s only now he can focus on more than one thing at a time that he managed to think of anything but Dean.

“Cas is okay,” Dean assures him because he knows that’s what Sam needs to hear. “He’s next door, sleeping. Want me to wake him?”

For a second he fears that Sam might actually say yes, for more than one reason. Dean doesn’t even know if Cas is really asleep – he probably isn’t, but he kind of hopes that Sam doesn’t want to rob his friend of possibly much-needed rest.

He’s right. Sam shakes his head and Dean smiles and pats his hair. His fingers get tangled in overlong strands that haven’t been brushed, let alone washed, in ages.

“I think you need a haircut, Sasquatch.” Dean nearly flinches the moment he uses the old nickname, because yeah, Sasquatch was hairy, but he was also big and strong. But Sam only smiles in that vague, fond way Dean thought he’d never see again and keeps looking at him as if he still can’t believe what he’s seeing.

“How are you feeling, little brother?” Dean has to clear his throat so his voice sounds halfway normal.

“Okay,” Sam whispers. It probably means that he can move two fingers without screaming in pain, but it’s a start. Dean nods as if Sam being okay was the most natural thing in the world. (It will never stop breaking his heart that it isn’t.)

“Got something for you,” he tells his brother. “You’re gonna like it. It’s the kind of girly thing you’re into.”

Sam only looks at him with slightly raised eyebrows Dean decides to interpret as “Bring it, Bro!” What Dean has to bring, though, is Sam, and that’s where his brilliant plan has potential for failing.

But Sam doesn’t scream, or even flinch, when Dean carefully slides an arm under his splinted legs and another under his back. He even tries to hold on to Dean when his brother lifts him up, though the result is more symbolic than anything else. For Dean it’s enough (for now).

He had the tub in the bathroom prepared when Sam showed the first signs of waking. It’s not the first time he did that, but so far he never got around to actually using it. Now, finally, he can gently sit his brother down beside it and remove the oversized shirt he’s dressed in. Thankfully, Sam doesn’t freak out when Dean undresses him. Dean isn’t quite sure what he expected.

Sam actually sighs when Dean lowers him into the water. It’s lukewarm because Dean hopes it will help with the fever but he doesn’t want it to feel uncomfortable. Sam still shivers, but he also makes a small, content sound in the back of his throat that leads to a cough Dean can tell he’s trying to suppress.

He still doesn’t know how she does it, but Jena even provided shampoo for this place. It’s labelled in Chinese so Dean doesn’t know what it’s called, but it hardly matters if this is some kind of private joke she’s playing on them. Dean has been using it for weeks and he hasn’t lost his hair yet, though admittedly he didn’t shower all that often. Only when Cas or Jena basically locked him in the bathroom and only let him out after he cleaned up some did he waste time on that. (“If you keep this up, Sam will smell you before he sees you,” Jena told him at some point, and that did it.)

The bathtub, no doubt thanks to Jena, is a lot larger than the tubs of shitholes like this usually are. Sam fits in without having to twist in ways that would hurt him and once Dean made sure his face won’t slip under the surface, he takes the showerhead and starts to gently wash his brother’s hair.

He hasn’t done this since Sammy was five.

Sam’s eyes begin to slip shut when Dean rinses the shampoo out of his hair, but that’s okay. Dean knew he wouldn’t be able to stay awake for long, even though he set a new record today. Sam’s going to feel much better in his skin now he’s clean. He always hated feeling sticky and disgusting.

“What is this place?”

The half-slurred question takes Dean by surprise. He didn’t think Sam to be still awake, let alone aware enough to wonder about their surroundings – though the fact that it took him this long to ask tells Dean clear enough that he probably isn’t up for the full answer.

“Something shitty, but safe,” he just says. “Don’t worry about it. A friend made it.”

“Bobby?” Sam mutters and breaks his brother’s heart, but he is asleep before Dean can come up with anything to say.

Sam stirs a little when Dean lifts him out of the tub and onto the towels he has spread all over the floor, but doesn’t even wake up when Dean dries him off and carries him back to the bed.

The sheets have been changed, causing Dean to spare a guilty thought for Cas. But it is Jena who comes in when Dean is done arranging his brother’s limps in a comfortable position.

She places a hand on Sam’s forehead and briefly closes her eyes. “The worst is over,” she judges after a moment. “It will only get better now.”

“Awesome,” Dean says, and means it.

“Indeed.” Jena doesn’t look all that enthusiastic. “It’s about time, too. Couldn’t have taken much longer.” She doesn’t seem inclined to elaborate that, though.

“You getting stir-crazy?” Dean askes.

The angel raises a single eyebrow at him. “You’re not?”

“Sure.” Actually, Dean tries not to think about it too much. “But the thought of dragging Sam back out there where everything tries to torture him into submission doesn’t exactly make me happy either.”

“If we have to stay here much longer I’m going to torture every single one of you into submission,” Jena grumbles.

Dean snorts. “That the reason why you made yourself so scarce lately?”

Jena manages a mix between glare and grimace. “What? Is the room service not to your satisfaction? You want me to shine your shoes, perhaps?”

Dean looks down at his shoes: faded, torn in places, good material suffering from too many miles. “I couldn’t help but wonder,” he says. “You never show up here when Sammy is actually awake. Is that down to general annoyance or is there something I should know about?”

“You mean, beyond the fact that I killed you a lot back in the day and a couple of other things Sammy might hold a grudge for?“ Jena shrugs. “Nah, we haven’t met. Well, once, but Sammy was dead at the time so I don’t think that counts.”

“It’s Sam,” Dean said automatically, correcting the nickname the way Sam used to. “So, no particular reason for your prolonged absences?”

“Oh, don’t act like you miss me.” Jena smirks and turns to go again. “No,” she clarifies. “I just didn’t think that Sam needs the stress of wondering about me. He’s got enough to deal with in that addled brain of his.”

That makes sense, though Dean doesn’t think it’s good enough. Because if that was the full reason, it would mean Jena is acting out of consideration for others, and if he knows the archangel Gabriel at all, the word consideration appears in his vocabulary only in the context of “Taking into consideration that I am responsible for this mess, it’s better to fuck off now.”

Not that Dean can claim the moral high ground on this one. Also, Jena _does_ help them right now. Perhaps there was some truth in her claim of having chosen a side.

Still, he has to ask the next time Sam wakes up, which happens a couple of hours later. His fever hasn’t gotten worse and he’s once again clear-minded enough to hold a conversation, much to Dean’s relief. It seems like his brother is really starting to get better now.

“Do you remember the dick of a trickster, also known as the archangel Gabriel we used to deal with a couple of times?” The question feels a little silly because that is hardly the kind of thing you forget about, but then Dean remembers that Sam is sixty-four now, even if he doesn’t look it. It’s hard to wrap his head around that, even if Dean continues to pointedly not think about all the years Sam spend in Hell.

Sam grimaces. “Hardly the kind of guy you’d forget,” he observes, nearly making Dean grin. “What about him?”

“Run into him lately?”

“Not that I’d know of.” Sam shakes his head. “Why?”

“We’re in his house.”

“What?” There has been a point to Jena’s worry about the effects the news would have on Sam’s health, because he tries to sit up and winches in pain when he thoughtlessly puts weight on his injured hand. Dean quickly supports him with a hand behind his back and pushes a few pillows between his brother and the headboard so he doesn’t fall over again.

“He’s a chick now, calls himself Jena and helped us save you from Lucifer.” Now he’s started, Dean might as well go on.

“What?” Sam says again. Poor boy looks confused and slightly disturbed and Dean begins to feel a little bad for doing this to him. Sam’s getting better, but that doesn’t mean he’s up he’s up for world-shattering revelations, not by a long shot. He’s probably not even up for discussions about the weather.

Especially since the weather has been nothing but depressing since Dean came back. It probably still is – somewhere behind the carpets that block the windows – if there even are windows behind them to be blocked.

“Don’t worry about it,” Dean therefore says. “She’s on our side. Just thought you should know in case you wondered about this place again.”

“You’re an idiot, Dean.”

Dean flinches – because the voice sounding behind him startled him, not because of the words. He kind of already knew that.

It’s Jena. Of course it is. She’s probably been spying on them all the fucking time – just waiting for the right moment to let Dean know in not so many words that she’s been standing behind the door listening in every time he thought he was alone with Sam. Probably together with Cas. She seems the type.

Except that subtlety of any kind really isn’t her style.

“He’s still breathing,” Dean defends his decision to tell Sam about her.

Just to make sure, he looks at his brother and finds him staring at the skinny girl in the doorway with this expression on his face that makes Dean suspect he’s trying to put two images together that just won’t fit. “Gabriel?” he croaks, hoarsely.

In the old days, Dean would totally have made fun of that look on his face.

Jens grins. “The one and only. Howdy.”

Sam blinks. And blinks again. “Your house sucks,” he says.

Not the expected greeting, but then, leave it to Sammy to state the obvious.

“I have a better one, but I didn’t want to let you in there,” Jena explains. “You’d just make a mess of the place.”

“Dean and Cas behave?” Sammy wants to know, his voice rough and weak like a whisper.

“Yes. They’re boring.”

“Where’s Cas?”

“Here.” Cas steps up behind Jena, in all his unshaven and rumpled glory. Dean sends an irritated glare his way. He never thought that his suspicion regarding the angels’ favorite way of spending their alone time was quite this accurate.

Sam’s smile, though tired and pained, still lights up the fucking room. Hell, Dean could swear that the fucking air smells better just because Sammy smiled.

At Cas. But that doesn’t matter now.

Cas smiles back, and Jena, who is much more likely responsible for the increase in air quality, grins nastily at Dean. “Touching, isn’t it?”

Sam starts to cough but manages to control it long enough to ask, “Why are you helping us?”

Jena shrugs. “It’s a gift horse. Don’t look for teeth.”

“Your gift horses have a habit of trampling their riders.” Sam seems to attempt a glare, but his eyes will only open halfway anymore and Dean can practically see the strength running out of him like water.

He can’t help but wonder if this is Jena’s doing; if she’s draining Sam’s strength just like she (somewhat) healed him before just so this discussion will end. But then, Sam’s pretty damn weak in general and it’s something of a miracle that he managed to stay awake this long and say this much.

Jena just waves his words away. “You don’t have that many friends, kid. Don’t be picky.”

Suddenly Cas steps forward. “I trust him,” he lets them know when Sam looks like he wants to say something else. And if that is enough for Sam then Dean will really have to kill someone.

“Dean doesn’t,” Sam whispers.

“I know. But even so, she’s the only one who can help us right now and she does. Let that be enough.” Cas speaks softly, and now he comes closer to sit on the edge of the bed, and he probably wants to do something girly like hug Sam, except Sam’s eyes have fallen fully shut and if Cas disturbs him now, Dean will cut off his arms, just because.

 

-

 

They leave Sam to sleep and retreat to the corridor, where they stand right behind the door so they’ll hear if Sam needs them. For a second, Dean marvels on the fact that they are all here – an archangel with powers he can’t begin to comprehend, a fallen angel without power but with determination and him – taking care of his little brother, the love for whom is the only thing at least two of them have in common. As for the third one…

“That was incredibly stupid,” Jena told him.

“You already said that.”

“It bears saying again. Stupid, Dean!”

“Why? Sam isn’t some delicate flower that will implode if you stare at it too hard. He took it pretty well, didn’t he?”

“He _is_ a fucking delicate flower,” Jena snaps at him. “You have no idea! That could have gone very differently!”

“Yeah? You mean, he could have had some more issues with all the crap you put us through in the past? Or maybe mentioned some suspicions about your motives for helping us?”

Jena rolls her eyes. “I get that you felt you needed to get some confirmation here that I am not, in fact, planning to sell you out to the highest bidder, but perhaps you should have stopped for just one second and considered that Sam has had some bad experiences with archangels like me in his life – and by “bad” I mean he will _never_ get over it. The fact that our first meetings weren’t as amusing to you two as they were to me doesn’t help, I admit. So next time you should maybe try some judgment of your own or trust that of your friends before you throw something at your brother that could trigger a flashback of mind blowing proportions, because believe me, you _don’t want that_.”

“Don’t know if you noticed, but my own judgment hasn’t won me any prizes lately,” Dean defends his decision. “And my circle of friends kind of, sort of consists of Cas here – and no offense, but I rather doubt he has my best interests in mind, not that I blame him.”

“Trust my good intentions for Sam, then,” Cas says darkly, instantly making the heavy lump in Dean’s stomach grow a little more heavy with something that might be shame. Cas has done a lot for Sam for much longer than Dean has even been around his brother. He certainly doesn’t deserve to be mistrusted for that.

“What about you, though?” he asks Jena to distract himself from the uncomfortable impression that he should perhaps start apologizing at some point. “I can hardly trust _your_ good intentions with Sam.”

“Yes, you can. I’ve put a lot of effort into keeping that boy alive and more or less functional. If you break that, I’m going to be pissed.”

That’s hardly the romantic approach, but for Dean it’ll have to be enough, for the moment, to accept that Sam is some kind of pet project for this archangel-turned-trickster-turned-chick and that she cares for his life at least as much as a farmer cares for the shed he’s rebuilding.

Which might just have been the lamest comparison Dean ever came up with.

 

-

 

As if to confirm Jena’s evaluation of just how much he isn’t okay, Sam starts tossing in his sleep not an hour later, and his whimpers quickly turn to screams. Screams of terror but also of pain, and Dean almost hopes that’s just because his tossing, weak as it is, is aggravating his injuries. He tries to hold him still, but Sam only screams harder then, and no matter how often Dean assures him he’s here now, Sam never stops calling his name as if Dean could save him.

It takes hours for Sam to fall still again, and when he does, Dean gathers him in his arms and holds him as closely as he dares, quietly breaking down himself when he can no longer deny that his brother is broken and will never be as he was, back when Dean knew him.

The fact that it’s all his fault – yeah, that doesn’t make it any better.

It’s a good thing Cas has the sense not to show up, because Dean might have killed him for interrupting after all. Either that, or he would have handed Sam over to his friend and thrown himself out of the non-existent window.

 

-

 

It takes another two or three presumed weeks, but eventually Sam is able to sit up on his own and even start walking again. Someone always has to support him, though, and it’s obvious that every step hurts like a bitch. He never complains, though, but works with clenched teeth and wordless determination on getting his weak legs to carry his weight again. They are not only suffering from the healing bones, but also from weeks of disuse. It will be a while before he can walk normally again.

If ever.

In the beginning, it’s a success if he manages to stand beside his bed for a minute, but sooner than Dean expected, he’s limping down the corridor, hanging heavily off Cas’s shoulder. That first time, he makes it to the room at the end of the corridor but not back. Cas offers to carry him and so does Dean, but Sam insists on wanting to walk himself, and if he can’t make it, he’s going to take a break until he can. So that day he sleeps on the mattress Dean woke up on weeks ago and never used again, and the next day, they have to lift him off the ground, because getting up from ground level is one of the basic abilities that are very much beyond him right now.

All the time, Dean watches over him and everything going on even if he doesn’t participate himself. Only once does he get the idea that maybe Sam is growing sick of his presence and longing for some peace, but then Sam looks up, his eyes searching for Dean as they sometimes do as if he has to confirm for himself that his brother is still there, and Dean feels justified to stay a little longer.

Apparently, the only thing he had to do to bind Sammy to him forever was leaving him alone for a couple of centuries.

Only once does Sam ask for Dean to leave him alone, and that’s to talk to Jena of all people. Dean doesn’t like it, but it’s not like he has concrete reason to protest. Sam is an adult, after all, and he should be able to manage a couple of minutes without big brother watching over him – or so Sam’s glare tell him when he uses it to shut Dean up before his protests can even start.

And then Cas’ glare keeps him from eavesdropping at the door while Jena and Sam have their conversation in the room Cas uses to sleep in.

Sam sleeps there as well now, sometimes, though mercifully without Cas. He’s sleeping everywhere, anywhere – depending on where he happens to be when his strength runs out. It’s like he’s tired of staying in the same room all the fucking time, and there’s something Dean can sympathize with one hundred percent.

He’s sleeping curled up on Cas’ narrow bed when Jena leaves the room after their super-secret conversation, and as expected neither of them ever tells Dean what they were talking about.

 

-

 

It’s another week or so before Jena tells them all that it’s time to leave.

Dean is the first one who has something to say in response. “You’re kidding, right?”

“What, you wanted to stay here until your beard turns grey?”

Automatically, Dean runs a hand over the hair on his face that has left the definition of stubble behind a day or two ago and is maybe the only indicator that time moves in this place at all. “I thought the idea was to stay until Sam is well again.”

Even as he says the words, Dean fears that Jena’s reply will be ‘This is as good as it gets.’

Instead she says, “He’s well enough,” which isn’t that much better.

“He can hardly walk!”

“But he _can_ walk. I’m calling that progress.”

“And what do you think will happen when we leave here? Have you forgotten that Lucifer, Michael and pretty much every angel and demon out there is looking for us? Think they will wait with their pursuit until he’s fit again? Postpone the hunt because it’s not enough of a challenge right now?”

“I can shield all of us from detection outside,” Jena reminds him impatiently. “The only difference is that we won’t have beds, and a roof, and we might have to hunt for food.”

“Then why won’t you just continue shielding us in here?”

“Because he can’t.”

Both Dean and Jena turn to look at Castiel in surprise. Castiel looks back at his older, but much smaller… sibling solemnly. “You’re running out of strength and have been for a while.”

“Well observed, Sherlock,” Jena grumbles.

“What do you mean, running out of strength?” For the first time in forever, Dean takes a close look at the girl Gabriel is wearing, but she looks the same as always to him. A little paler, perhaps, and maybe there’s a fine sheen of sweat on her face and her hands are trembling…

Well, shit.

“I could keep it up for another week or two, but if we stay until my strength has ran out completely, we’ll be entirely without protection for a long time after everything collapsed around us,” Jena explains. “If we go now, we’ll lose the comfort of electric light and running water, but otherwise we’ll be mostly safe. I can shield us from detection, so as long as we keep moving, we shouldn’t be at a much higher risk outside than we are here.”

Dean looks through the half-closed door into the room where Sam is sleeping fitfully on his bed and thinks that the moving part is going to be their biggest problem. “What exactly does ‘now’ mean in this context?”

“It means you should get your stuff together and try to get you brother ready. I’m giving you two days, three at the most.”

“I can’t even tell what a day is in here.”

“You’ll notice when they are over.”

Dean and Castiel share a look. It’s obvious that Cas doesn’t like the idea of leaving either, but he nods slowly. He probably understands a lot better than Dean how Gabriel’s powers work. “We’ll be ready,” he promises.

 

-

 

Dean and Cas may be ready, but that doesn’t mean Sam is. His fever gets worse before Dean can even tell him they’re going to leave. He has a terrible night, wakes up miserable and disoriented, flinching away whenever anyone tries to touch him. Dean very nearly tells Jena to go fuck herself, he’s going to take the risk of being without protection for a bit if it means Sammy can have a few more weeks to recover. But in the long run that’s not going to work to Sammy’s benefit – what’s the point of Sam being able to walk on his own if Lucifer can find him within a few days?

Sam gets better soon, though. He wakes from his nap more coherent, and his fever is down a little, though he is so weak Dean feels tired just looking at him, as if by preserving his own strength he can give some to his brother.

When Dean tells him they are going to leave, Sam isn’t surprised. He’s quiet, though, and Dean doesn’t know if that’s because he doesn’t have the strength to speak or if he’s worried about their prospects.

Either way, he doesn’t protest. He just works on getting his strength back, with the grim determination that is so typical for him. Mostly, he stays in bed – no more walking around for no reason, no unnecessary wasting of energy – but he gets up every now and then, when he feels up to it. Keeps moving, keeps working on getting his muscles to support him.

In all the time he’s hardly eaten anything at all. Dean is convinced that Jena somehow keeps him alive because otherwise he would have starved, plain and simple. Still, Sam keeps trying to eat, and sometimes he’s even able to keep the food down. It’s not enough, though – not for someone on the run, and somehow Dean doesn’t think whatever Jena’s doing to support Sam’s body is going to work as well outside of this place.

The morning of the third day (Dean measures time by counting how often Sammy sleeps and wakes up rested) Sam is sitting on his bed, for the first time fully clothed in jeans and a hoodie over a shirt over a t-shirt. Jena must have provided those clothes, and Dean really hopes they won’t evaporate into thin air the moment they leave. Holding a dark brown coat across his legs, Sam is a little pale, but he looks mostly okay.

He looks ready. Dean wishes he would feel ready himself.

Cas is dressed in clothes that look a lot like what he was wearing when Dean first met him in the wasteland, and Dean is dressed in what he was wearing when they came here – but it’s in better condition. The dirt has gone from his jeans and the holes in his shoes have been fixed. Jena, on the other hand, doesn’t wear any shoes at all, as usual. For some random reason, Gabriel doesn’t seem to like shoes in this incarnation.

There’s a door in the corridor that hasn’t been there before. They leave through it into a land that’s empty, just rocks and earth and wind. Dean has his arm around Sam who’s huddled in his coat, and tries to shield him from the cold breeze that smells vaguely of salt. For a moment, he closes his eyes, just enjoys the feeling of air on his face.

Their footsteps leave barely an imprint in the hard earth. After a few dozen steps Dean turns around to have a look at the house that has been their shelter for the past weeks and saved Sammy’s life. There’s nothing there.

 

-

 

The sky above them is grey when they leave and nothing looks familiar. For a long time Dean wonders if perhaps centuries have passed since they entered the house. Then the sun rises and the red and orange that he has come to know so well creeps across the sky like radioactive dirt through veins. It doesn’t mean anything, really, because the sky might have been like this for centuries and might remain this way forever. It doesn’t matter, because everyone they knew is already dead and the world doesn’t change.

If they have been gone for a millennium, Dean wouldn’t even notice.

Sam doesn’t make it for long – he needs a break before the red has completely eaten the grey in the sky and leans heavily against Dean as they are resting, in the open, too far from the rocks to find shelter there. Dean already misses the house, the beds, the walls and the hot water. Sammy’s head hangs low and he’s struggling for breath after they have walked for barely even a mile.

Cas and Jena stand beside them like silent guards. Their eyes scan the area, but there’s nothing. Nothing. Dean doesn’t even know what continent they are on.

Despite the faint odor of salt, they don’t appear to be anywhere near the sea. The view isn’t well today, the world they are in limited in all directions by diffuse twilight, but no as far as Dean can see there’s just stone and stone and stone, almost flat, almost even. Rocks in the distance, and a thin layer of earth every now and then that doesn’t preserve their footprints and doesn’t house any plants.

Sam isn’t ready, but eventually, they have to move on. Sam leans on Dean more and more, and he’s done before afternoon. They are still too far from the rocks when he sits down, then lies, heaving painful breaths between agonizing coughs. Jena’s face is closed off and giving nothing away, but Castiel shares a dark look with Dean as the reality of what they are trying to do crashes down on them and kills all illusions.

They can’t stay in this spot – even without demons or angels around, it’s too open, offering no protection from the cold wind that has to be cutting into Sam’s struggling lungs like razorblades. Castiel picks him up in the end and carries him in his arms like a child. Sam barely manages to hold on to him, hanging more and more limply. When after an hour or two it looks like Cas is finally running out of strength, Dean takes Sam from him, but by then they are already between the rocks, just looking for a place to rest.

What they find in the end is not even a cave. It’s just a place that’s protected from all sides by rocks that are concave enough to form some sort of roof. The sky above is darkening quickly; the light has been poor all day, even for the new standards and Dean would think it looks like rain, like an oncoming storm, except it doesn’t. It just looks like the world is darker than before and won’t ever light up again.

Sam is placed on a bed made of half the blankets they took along and covered in the other half. His head rolls to the side as soon as Dean lays him on the ground and his coughs have long since been replaced by quiet wheezing. Once he is settled, Dean walks over to Jena who sits with her back to the opening and watches them without speaking.

“This isn’t going to work,” he hisses, but quietly so Sam won’t hear. “What the fuck are we going to do? Sam didn’t even make it through the first day!”

“We knew it wouldn’t be easy.” Jena sounds serious, but entirely unimpressed, though her eyes never leave Sam’s now still form. “Sam wouldn’t have been that much better if we had waited another week, but then we would have been forced to run a hell of a lot faster.”

“What’s the point of all this if Sam’s going to die within a day or two? Look at him! He can hardly even breathe.”

“He’ll make it.” Jena says it as if it was a decision she’s made, not a hope or at best a speculation. “Because he’ll have to.”

It’s all she has to say about it. Frustrated, Dean returns to his brother, and to Cas who is sitting beside him. When the sky loses the last remnants of light and color, they both lie left and right beside Sam and keep him warm as best they can.

 

-

 

“Where are we, anyway?”

The wind is cutting the next day as well, but the earth on the other side of the rocks is less hard and the dirt covers their clothes and gets into their eyes. Sam’s coughing all the time and if anyone had asked Dean they would have waited between the rocks until the wind had died – but then, maybe it never does and they’d starve in their hiding place. As it is, they have only very little food and Dean doesn’t know how they will find anything edible, here, where nothing grows and nothing lives but them.

“Can’t tell you,” Jena says, the wind tangling her long hair. She’s looking a lot better than she did those last few days in the house. “Security, you know? Don’t take it personally.”

Dean kind of does, but he can understand the reasoning. Michael can still come to him and the last time he did, Dean managed to give something away he didn’t even know himself.

“At least tell me if we are still in America.”

Bt Jena doesn’t.  She keeps walking on through the clouds of dirt and Dean falls back until he’s with Sam again, and with Cas who’s supporting Sam while Dean’s brother does his best to keep up with them.

Cas probably knows where they are. He used to have an excellent internal compass, in any case – but then, that was long ago.

Sam doesn’t know, which at least means Dean’s not the only clueless guy here. On the other hand, Sam probably is too occupied with breathing to care much.

However, only a minute after Dean’s return he asks, “Where are we going?” proving once again that he has the admirable ability to simultaneously breathe and think.

And there they say only women can multitask.

“There is a canyon not two hours from here,” Castiel answers his question, and Dean’s unasked one about whether or not he knows where they are. “Beyond that the ground is more fertile and we should be able to find food. But for today we will only go to the canyon. There is water, and it’s sheltered from the wind.”

“No.” Sam shakes his head. His voice is rough from all the coughing. “That’s not where we’re going. It’s just where we are going to stop.”

“This is not the right time to get philosophical, Sammy,” Dean scolds, and Cas explains, “Beyond the canyon we should be able to find a place to stay for a few days, so you can rest,” which isn’t much more helpful than what he gave them before.

Sam’s foot catches on the uneven ground and he stumbles for the third time since Dean’s failed attempt to get information out of the archangel walking ahead. “Still not what I mean,” he says after Dean and Cas straightened him again.

Dean does know what he means, but he can’t answer this question and he doesn’t know if Cas or even Jena could. For now they have to keep moving. The angels can’t sense them and no magic can find their trail with Gabriel shielding them, but there are still all kinds of things and people on the lookout for them, and the longer they stay in one place the more likely they are going to be found. And first of all, they have to leave this wasteland behind.

They’ll have to keep running long enough for Sam to fully recover (or as much as he can recover anymore) which will not benefit from being on the run. And after that…

After that they’ll have to find a way to get rid of the devil for good, or else they will never be safe.

“I dreamt of Lucifer tonight,” Sam suddenly says. Dean looks at him in surprise and concern, but Sam’s head has sunken forward and his hair is hanging in his face, obscuring it.

After sharing a concerned glance with Cas, Dean glares at Jena’s back. While they were in the house, Lucifer never came to Sam in his dreams – at last not in person. In this case, it’s obvious that Sam isn’t talking about a nightmare. Those are so inevitable that he never bothered to mention them in the first place.

“What did he want?” Dean asks.

“He’s angry.”

That’s not a surprise, really. It still worries Dean more than he cares to admit because an angry Lucifer was probably not very kind to his baby brother, and while Sam seems pretty calm about it, Dean doesn’t know how much more he can possibly take.

“He was very close to getting what he wanted,” Castiel observes. “He must be very frustrated.”

If possible, Sam hangs his head even more. “I’m sorry,” he whispers.

“No.” The hold of Dean’s arm around him tightens instinctively and is maybe stronger than it should be. “You don’t apologize for that. If anything, you should be fucking proud of yourself for making it so long. And, dammit, Sammy – you didn’t give in! I’m to one who should be sorry. And I am!”

Sam doesn’t respond. He just draws his shoulders up like a fucking child trying to become invisible and maybe the tremble Dean feels isn’t just the cold and the weakness but he’s fucking crying, and Hell, after everything he’s been through Sammy has the right to be a little emotional, but fuck, this is just wrong.

“Aw, shit, Sammy,” Dean curses and stops to pull Sam into an embrace. Considering the fact that the world already ended, behaving like a girl doesn’t matter so much anymore.

Sam’s head sags onto Dean’s shoulder and his body shakes with silent sobs. Dean has no idea why he’s crying, though, yeah, he does have plenty of reasons to do so. Perhaps Sam doesn’t even know why he’s doing it himself, but it doesn’t matter anyway. Dean just holds him close, his hand resting on the back of Sam’s head, stroking his hair. And perhaps it’s not really his place to comfort anyone, but Sammy still needs him, not that that would absolve him of any guilt.

Castiel waits patiently and without comment until Sam’s sobs finally subside. Jena, who walked ahead, comes back when they aren’t following anymore. She does look like she’s got something to say but keeps quiet when Dean glares at her.

It’s good to know that where Sam is concerned, Dean can still stare an archangel into submission.

The crying exhausted Sam, though. He sways on his feet when he finally pulls away and Cas has to step in and catch him so he doesn’t fall. Jena actually has the gall to roll her eyes at the sight and Dean thinks about strangling her, except that they still need her and it wouldn’t work anyway.

Well, he’s just so sorry she’s inconvenienced by Sam being weak after going through figurative and literal Hell for ages because Gabriel couldn’t be assed to pick a fucking side.

“We have to cover another five miles before we can rest,” Cas tells Sam with some regret. “There will be shelter there, and water. We are running out. Can you make it?”

Sam takes a deep, shaky breath and nods. It’s not like he has another choice.

“I’ll carry you,” Dean offers, but Sam shakes his head.

“I can manage,” he whispers. “You’re already carrying my backpack.”

Dean nearly laughs at that. Yes, he’s carrying a duffel and a backpack, but they never planned for Sam to carry anything in the first place.

And their luggage isn’t exactly heavy. Just blankets, a couple of water bottles and a small bag with food. Why Jena couldn’t create more of that before they left is beyond Dean, but he supposes there is a reason for it.

Or she just forgot. It’s not like she needs to eat, anyway. Unless it’s candy.

Sam’s resolve to walk on his own carries him for an impressive five minutes before he’s stumbled and fallen to his knees so often Cas simply hoists him into his arms and carries him. After a while Dean takes over, then Cas again, since he’s the stronger one, much as Dean hates to admit it. Only Jena never helps out, even though as a full-powered angel she’s the strongest of them all. But no matter how skinny Sam has become, he still has two heads length on her, which would make it incredibly awkward – and really, couldn’t Gabe have found a vessel that’s a little bigger? A tall and strong guy, for instance? That would really come in handy here.

The bad view and harsh wind make it hard to move and they need a lot longer for the five miles than they would have otherwise. It’s difficult to walk through this even for Dean – no surprise then that Sam didn’t make it. The ground gets more and more uneven, too, and Dean just hopes they are getting there soon.

With the sand and dirt flying all around them, it’s impossible to tell the time. There’s no sky anymore, not even the red one. There’s just this brown soup they are swimming through, but Dean’s still sure it’s getting darker, a little – or maybe that’s just the sand getting thicker.

It’s getting colder, though, or so he thinks. He doesn’t know for sure, but when he carries Sam he sweats and when he doesn’t the wind is cooling off the damp spots on his clothes which is fucking freezing no matter if the temperatures are one degree above total zero or three. Dean doesn’t complain, though. Neither of them is – not even Sam. Sam just asks to be let down at some point, when it can’t be that far to the canyon anymore simply because like this they won’t make it that much further. He squirms in Cas’ arms and for a moment Dean thinks it’s some kind of stupid pride thing or Sam trying not to be a bother by walking on his own again and he’s ready to scold him and tell him to stop being stupid. But Sam falls to his knees as soon as Cas lets him down and starts retching. Then he coughs and then he retches again, though there is very little but more coughs to be brought up. Dean kneels beside him and keeps him from falling into his own vomit, none too happy to notice his brother covered in sweat. The last thing Sammy needs is to be fucking damp in this weather.

And fuck, what could this day possibly do to get any worse?

Well, it could start to rain, for starters. It doesn’t and that’s something at least, but that’s as much luck as they have. Sam doesn’t throw up again but he’s gone from alternately breathing and coughing to alternately wheezing and coughing, and even Cas looks worried now. They have to walk for at least another day before they reach a place where they can rest for a while, and in that day they have to get through a fucking canyon. Just great.

Then they finally reach the canyon – and it is getting darker now, there is no denying. And, okay, the wind isn’t as strong here and the sand barely reaches them, but they still have to make their way down a slope made of rocks and loose pebbles if they want to find a place that can really shelter them, and when Cas and Jena came up with this location, maybe they should have considered that they have someone in their group who can’t fucking walk.

Of course Sam tries, because that’s what Sam does. But at this point breathing is challenge. Mountain climbing is a bit out of the question.

The problem is that all of them need all their hands to climb down. It’s impossible to carry someone here. It’s not even that steep, but it’s tricky, and Dean for his part wouldn’t want to slip and tumble all the way down with Sam in tow.

“Any brilliant plans for this?” he asks Jena, who’s waiting for them at the edge of the canyon. “Summon some ropes or something. An escalator would be nice, too.”

“I can’t do that,” she reminds him. “The moment I use my powers like that Lucifer will come knocking on our non-existent door.”

“Then how are we supposed to get Sam down there, short of camping up here and climbing down when he’s rested?” After a lot of thinking, this is the best Dean came up with, and he really doesn’t like the idea. This is a shitty place to spend the night, and if he were honest, he’d have to admit that he doesn’t have that much hope that Sam will be much, if any, better tomorrow.

He needs a place where he can really recover, with beds and hot water, and ideally an army of doctors and tons of medication. But, oh, those places don’t exist anymore. (And whose fault was that again?)

“If we stay here we’ll need one day more than planned to cross to the other side. Our supplies can’t take that, and neither can Sam. You’ll find a way.”

Jena: optimistic, but useless.

In the end Dean has Sam climb on his back and Castiel uses the rope he had in his old duffel to secure him, since no one believes for one moment he’ll be able to hold on all the way down. It’s an awkward solution; Sam’s not heavy, but his limbs are in the way and Dean does his best to climb carefully and not jostle him too much. Twice he slips and has to throw himself forward not to fall and each time Sam makes this little wounded noise in the back of his throat that makes Dean want to go and kill something.

Jena is climbing first, and at least she seems to know where she’s leading them. In the growing darkness, Dean sees her disappear between a few rocks and hopes that that’s finally it. His hands are bloody and they are running out of light.

Above them, Cas is making his way down a lot slower that he has to. Keeping watch.

“Dean,” Sam suddenly says, sounding helpless and desperate, like he did when he was a little boy and really sick. Sure enough he starts retching again, and then he coughs acid bile all over Dean’s shoulder.

Dean pats his hand. “It’s okay, Sammy.”

It’s not like Sam never puked on this jacket before.

They make it down to where Jena is waiting in the last bit of light. It’s probably not even that late yet, but the sand and dust drifting above the canyon swallow every light.

Jena has already started a fire when they arrive. Dean almost asks if that’s not too risky, but if anyone could see the light here, they would already have found them anyway.

The place is pretty good, he has to admit. It’s a cave – not too deep, but with an entrance mostly protected by rocks and a convenient gab in the ceiling to let out the smoke. It’s protected from the wind and with the fire burning it’s almost warm.

Jena’s also already prepared a resting place for Sam. With Cas’ help Dean places his brother on the blankets, then he pulls him into a half-sitting position and puts his water flask to his dry and cracked lips. Sam’s always hated the taste of vomit after throwing up.

“You okay?” he asks afterwards, when he’s settled Sam down and covered him in blankets. His brother’s hand is cold and clam and completely limp in his, even as Sam nods weakly and closes his eyes.

For a while Dean considers moving him closer to the fire, but already the smoke is aggravating Sam’s troubled lungs and his cough starts up again.

Cas, in the meantime, is tending to the fire and warming up a couple of cans over the flame. In the face of his brother’s suffering, Dean feels almost guilty for how hungry the sight makes him.

“Where’s Jena?” he asks when he can’t find the girl anywhere.

“Down in the canyon,” Cas explains. “There’s a river there. Gabriel is filling up our water bottles.”

“All the way down? In the dark?” It seems like a very stupid thing to do.

For the first time in forever, Dean sees something like an amused smile on Castiel’s bloodless lips. “You forget who she is.”

Well. There’s that.

Indeed Jena comes back not ten minutes later, carrying a backpack with filled up water bottles. Dean gratefully accepts one, glad that he can quench his thirst without having to think about rationalizing for once. He then gratefully accepts a can of food that tastes a hundred times better when it’s hot and warming him from the inside, and watches as Jena kneels beside Sam and takes hold of his wrist and puts the other hand on his forehead as Dean has seen her do it many times before.

“I want to try to get him to eat something when he wakes up,” he says quietly when she’s done, but she shakes her head at him.

“If you want him to suffocate on his own vomit, go ahead.”

“He needs to eat something.”

“I know.” But she shakes her head again. “Make him drink a lot. It’s all you can do.”

She doesn’t say if there’s anything _she_ can do, but Dean trusts that if there is, she’s doing it.

Once again he looks at his brother, pale and still and wheezing, and can’t help but think that they are dragging him to his death.

 

-

 

Since she doesn’t need sleep, Jena takes up watch again. It’s nice not having to be woken every few hours to take over while on the road, but Dean doesn’t get a lot of sleep anyway. Sam’s fever flares up in the middle of the night, and then he starts talking in his sleep.

Well, screaming would be more the word, if he actually had the strength and the air to scream.

Dean doesn’t know if this is a nightmare or Lucifer himself. He only knows that it makes Sam cough a lot, and that they can’t wake him.

They don’t get to start with the first rays of light, as planned. They get to start when Sam is awake and more or less coherent. Dean makes him drink, but he choughs most of it up again. He’s in no way up to climbing through a damn canyon, but he has to. So this time he’s tied to Cas’ back, and that works actually better, much as Dean hates to see it. Cas is still stronger than him, even though he’s also shorter and Sam’s long legs get in the way more. Cas handles it with grace and practice, making Dean wonder if he’s done this before.

It’s all made worse by Sam moaning with every step that’s a little too hard. By midday, he starts to struggle against the bonds keeping him on Cas’ back, almost bringing his friend off balance.

They are forced to set up camp down in the canyon, beside the river, because Sam can’t go on, not even being carried. It’s jut a short break, tough – Jena is adamant on them having to get to the other side before the day is over, laving Dean to wonder if there is something she’s not telling them or if they really are just running out of food.

Down here the wind doesn’t reach them. The view is clear, but the rocks towering over them keep out what little brightness the dusty sky has to offer, bathing the place in constant twilight. Yet there are plants growing beside the river: short, yellowish grass, fern. It’s not much, but it’s the first sign of life they have seen in days.

It’s a little warmer down here, but it’s still pretty cold. Sam’s shivering constantly and Dean hates that he can’t do anything for him, not anything but get him upright as soon as he opened his eyes and forced down a few gulps of water, and drag him onwards.

They need to cross the river, and while it’s not wide and Jena finds them a place where the water barely reaches up to their ankles, it still means that their feet are getting wet. They get out of their shoes and Cas takes Sam to carry him over in his arms. Sam’s conscious and more coherent than before. He insists on walking but neither of them wants to imagine what getting his feet cold and wet would do to his already very compromised health.

Cas takes the lead with Dean following right behind. The icy water is more painful with every step and the stones he’s walking on dig in the soles of his feet. Cas slips once, nearly dropping Sam. Only Jena seems to enjoy the play of icy water around her slender ankles.

Getting back into his socks and shoes feels wonderful. Dean appreciates them more as they walk on.

The way up is easier than the way down. They can see where they are going now instead of basically moving backwards all the time, and the slope is not as steep. To Dean’s happy surprise they make good progress, reaching some sort of plateau in the last light of the day. They can hear the wind roar above them but here, they are still protected. Another half hour and they should reach the end of the climb, but they are not going to do that today.

Jena makes them wait on the plateau while she enters a promising looking cave in the wall of stone ahead. Dean understands why when they are allowed to follow and find her sitting there with the corpse of a freshly killed wild dog and two equally dead whelps.

“Dinner,” she says, grinning wildly, and yeah, Dean doesn’t really like the thought of eating these animals, but they are mostly out of cans and these are not times to be picky.

Sam sleeps through the meal. He’s breathing a little easier, but these are not circumstances under which anyone could get well. “You said we could rest a while when we reach the other side,” Dean says, turning to Jena. “Do you know the area?”

It’s Cas who answers. “I used to hide there, once. It was long ago, though, so I don’t know if my old hiding place still exists.”

“It does,” Jena assures him. “Needs a little work, though.”

“Isn’t that risky?” Dean takes another bite of dog. “Won’t they look for us there?”

“They are looking for us everywhere, and they don’t know all of Cas’ old hiding places. It’s a big planet, Dean.”

“Yeah, but we’re still on the same continent, which narrows it down – that is, unless Cas conveniently built a boat back in the day.”

“We’re still on the continent,” Cas confirms.

“Well, judging by the temperature, we’re in fucking Alaska.”

“Don’t draw conclusions. The temperature doesn’t much depend on the area anymore,” Jena tells Dean – as if Dean didn’t already know that. He covered a lot of ground while travelling with Cas, and the weather was basically the same everywhere.

“Does that mean it’s getting colder?” he asks. “Because it is colder than I remember it.”

“I would think it is. There have been slow changes in the weather all the time,” Cas answers. “We should hope that it does not get freezing. We aren’t equipped for that.”

Dean’s thoughts turn to Sam immediately. He’s barely making it as it is. What that boy needs is a long vacation somewhere warm, not a fucking global winter.

He looks at the leftovers of the wild dog – a fucking big animal, looking almost like a wolf – that still are where Jena left them after taking the beast apart. “We should definitely keep the fur,” he says.

 

-

 

The do keep the fur, but before they can do anything with it, it still needs work. For now it’s just another piece of luggage. They also take the meat that’s left along as they move on. Once again they have reached the point where they can’t afford to let anything go to waste.

Sam’s better the next morning. He can even walk on his own, though Dean can’t ignore the thin lines of pain around his mouth that remind him that both of Sam’s legs have been broken not that long ago.

There is only a short part of the way that is so difficult they have to carry him. Everything else is easy, just walking upwards, not even that steep. It still leaves Sam completely exhausted after a day of high fever and no food at all.

Dean tries to get him to eat but just looking at the roasted meat makes his brother throw up. Jena promises that they will find fruits soon, but Dean isn’t convinced that in this climate they’ll find anything at all.

The temperature is another problem. To Dean it’s simply uncomfortable, but Sam’s body has no reserves to fall back on, no meat on his bones to keep away the cold. He’s shivering violently all the time and while that warms him some, it’s also burning away energy he doesn’t have to spare. Dean knows how that works. Unless they can get him warm and fed, his brother will either freeze to death or die of exhaustion sometime soon. Whatever comes first.

At least there is vegetation now. The ground is covered in grass that gets thicker the further they walk and there are trees within sight, almost enough to deserve being called a forest. Dean feels drawn to them – they promise food that Sam might be able to eat and most of all they promise shelter. There is no one around but them, but he still would feel safer if they were finally out of the open.

But Jena keeps leading them along the edge of the canyon. Eventually Dean can hear a noise in the distance he identifies as water: there is another river up here, and it’s falling down into the canyon somewhere ahead of them.

The river they come upon is far wider than the one down in the canyon, which makes Dean wonder where all the water is lost on the way down. They follow the river upstream, Sam stumbling along. According to Cas, the place they are looking for is another two hours from the canyon. Sam won’t make that, of course, and Dean’s arms are sore and aching from the long time of carrying him. He will still carry him, of course. Happily.

Well, happily and painfully. But Cas is doing his part and Sam is doing his best to walk on his own. He could probably go further than they let him and keeps protesting when they pick him up. Dean can imagine that he finds this humiliating on top of not wanting to burden them more than he has to, but Dean and the others can’t risk him overexerting himself. He’s weak. He needs whatever little strength he has or he will simply die on them. He’ll walk for a few hours and then he’ll die.

And Lucifer will never let him go.

At least Sam is still conscious when they pass through the trees. There are few enough for them to travel easily, yet enough to block the view to all directions and give Dean finally some sort of security. There’s moss on the ground that cushions their steps.

They take a final break underneath one of the few bigger trees and afterwards Sam gets up and moves on before anyone else, letting them know without any doubt that he is not going to be carried any further. He’s breathing okay, though, so Dean lets him, just moves to his side and supports him whenever he stumbles.

It’s been a long time since he’s walked on ground like this. Or seen a tree that wasn’t dead.

It’s just after midday when they arrive at their destination. The place Cas once spent a few weeks in is a mix between a cabin and a hole in the ground. It’s more a hole, though – the cabin is a few twigs and branches between three trees, while the hole is leading to an underground cave that isn’t very high, in some places not even high enough for Sam to stand upright. The way down isn’t easy – Sam has to climb himself because there is no room to help him.

Dean is beginning to think that Cas called every damn cave on the continent his home at some point. This one has holes in the ceiling, which is one of the reasons for the makeshift little cabin on top of it. It’s not the most cozy place ever, but it’s safe enough. The holes in the ceiling offer a chance to have a fire inside because the smoke can get out. It will be warm in here. There are some old furs – not as many as in the other cave, the one in the dead land, and they are not as well preserved, but they offer some comfort.

At least that’s what Dean thinks, until they inspect the furs and find them infected with so many insects they can only burn them.

Well, there’s the one they are carrying with them. Cas can take care of working it into something they can use, Dean decides. He seems to have a thing for that.

For now, they settle. Sam, for all his bitching about independent movement, gladly accepts the nest of blankets Dean creates for him. Cas collects wood and Jena makes a fire under the biggest opening, far enough from where Sam is lying, so that the smoke won’t affect him that much. Kid’s been breathing well today, hardly any coughing, and that’s awesome since coughing is fucking exhausting. He looks tired, though, but that’s understandable. He’s feverish, too, and if Dean knows him at all that will get worse now and they’ll be in for another awesome night. But for now Sam stays awake, if passive and weak. It’s the first time he doesn’t pass out the moment he lies down, if he even made it that far.

Dean makes him drink about a gallon of water, until Sam simply refuses to take another swallow. While Dean and Cas eat the roasted meat left over from the day before, Sam eats about a third of one of their last remaining cans, and damn if that isn’t the most amazing thing Dean has ever seen.

Afterwards, he has to pee. Yeah, so, no surprise – Dean did make him drink up a fucking lake, after all. But it means he has to move, and he can’t even get up on his own. Seriously, if they are going to stay they need a bed for him, something high so he doesn’t have to lie on the ground all the time, and of course that’s not going to happen. Instead, Dean helps him up and helps him to the mouth of the cave, and then watches unhappily as Sam climbs out, because no matter how shitty he feels and how much easier it would be, Sam isn’t going to take a piss in the fucking cave they are sleeping in. Oh no, Sam Winchester has fucking standards.

And he threatens to castrate Dean if he doesn’t take his business outside as well.

Cas and Jena don’t get castration threats because Jena doesn’t need to pee and has no balls and Cas apparently is a well trained little dog. And no, Dean’s not going to start that again, he isn’t. Not that Sam knows there even is something he could start again. He just knows that the living room is no place for a toilet, so he wanders off until he finds a tree that suits him (and what the Hell, Sam, wouldn’t the outside of the hut have been enough?) and gets rid of all the water. And then he sways a little, and when Dean leads him back he’s shivering, and his bones are probably aching, and the next time Dean will just give him a frigging bottle.

Getting down into the hole would be a bitch if Cas wasn’t waiting down there, taking over after Dean helped his brother slide in. Naturally, Cas also leads Sam to his nest and tugs him in and maybe Dean will start it again after all. If he doesn’t find anything better to do.

Coming from the outside, the cave smells more like smoke than Dean noticed before, and Sam’s coughing again. Just great.

As predicted, his brother falls asleep quickly, and just as sure his fever rises before nightfall. Dean doesn’t worry too much, since it’s still manageable and they won’t have to leave with the first light of morning. It’s not exactly hot inside the cave, but it’s warm enough to be vaguely comfortable, and besides, Sam ate something. That has to count for something, right?

He falls asleep beside his brother and doesn’t wake up before Sam’s retching pulls him from his dreams a few hours later.

 

-

 

Sam’s sickness lingers for days, but it’s not bad. Not as bad as it has been. Cas doesn’t seem worried and Cas knows better how to handle Sam’s health so Dean tries not to be worried either. It’s hard, though. Almost as hard as it is to accept that Cas really does know better now.

This is all Dean’s fault. The world, Sam’s illness, not to mention the decades of torture, so Dean should really get over himself and stop whining about someone else having replaced him as the big brother.

Besides, it’s still his name Sam’s calls first when he wakes up. And when he calls out in the middle of a nightmare, accompanied by “No” and “Stop”… well, Dean doesn’t need a monopoly on _that_.

True to form, Cas does make something out of the dog’s fur. It’s not big enough to use as a blanket, so he creates a vest and actually wears it. “It’s cold,” he just says when Dean makes fun of him.

It _is_ cold, though, outside the cave. And someone always has to go outside the cave, to collect wood for the fire, refill the water supply, or just to pee, because Sam doesn’t know any pardon when it comes to that.

The forest around them, although it barely deserves to be called that, is home to a lot of edible animals. Interestingly enough, the biggest population is that of those wolf-like wild dogs, and Dean will probably never get used to the taste of their meat. Fortunately there are rabbits and deer as well. And snakes. Definitely better than the dogs, and yeah, so he did tell Sam once to stuff it when Sam told him to be more open minded with his eating habits, so what?

There are even fruits for Sam, and something Cas assures Dean can serve as salad. It’s better than nothing since Sam won’t touch meat. Dean is happy when he eats at all, which isn’t all that often.

It gets better, though. Gradually, Sam gets better. He coughs a little less, eats a little more, sleeps more regularly. He’s still in pain, but Dean only knows that because he knows his brother. Sam doesn’t show it.

The first day after arriving, Jena carefully stripped Dean’s half-conscious brother of his pants to have a look at his legs and Dean only thought, _How could he walk of them this far?_ Not only are they thin as sticks – something Dean will never got used to seeing on his brother – they are also swollen and black and purple in places.

And the scars… Dean won’t ever get used to the scars either.

They are everywhere on Sam’s body: new ones from his most recent torture but also old, faded lines Lucifer let him keep as a memento for all the fun times they spend together. Like the thin white scars running over Sam’s face. For all Dean knows Sam is lucky to have both of his eyes again.

According to Jena, the legs are healing well, as is everything else. Well enough, anyway, for her to leave on day three and not come back.

Cas says she’ll return eventually but Dean isn’t so sure. Even if he did trust her, he would like to know what she’s doing and why – and when she intends to be back, so they can tell from her being late that she got caught by Lucifer or Michael and that they have to leave before she spills where they are hiding.

“She’ll be back before we have to go,” Cas just says when Dean asks if he knows anything, but Dean isn’t sure he really has as much confidence in his sibling as he pretends.

It’s quiet in her absence. Dean and Cas don’t talk much and Sam doesn’t seem to have much to say either when he’s awake. The fever makes it hard for him to focus on anything for long. When he can, he asks Cas about how he spent the time he carried Sam’s soul. Dean gets that Cas has a lot more to tell in that regard than he does, but he still feels left out during those moments, preferring to go outside and do something useful instead of listening as he probably should.

Days pass like that. Usually, they make sure to be inside when night falls, but today Dean just had to get outside. Sam has been well the last few days, for his standards. His fever has fallen a little, he ate, and held a proper conversation. But that conversation was about how Cas had found Dean in the wasteland and Cas kept avoiding his questions for some reason while Sam kept going more and more quiet, just throwing glances at Dean every now and then. Eventually, Dean just can’t take it anymore. He grabs one of the spears he cut out of strong branches and goes out, and neither of the others bothers to point out that it’s already dusk.

Coming from the warm cave, the cold hits him like a fist. At least it’s not windy today, but Dean still shivers. He’s just wearing a sweater and a deer-skin vest he had to gratefully accept from Cas because he gave his leather jacket to Sam one night and the kid likes to hide beneath it and bury his face inside when he cries in his sleep so what is Dean supposed to do?

But Sam’s been quiet around him lately. The more coherent he is, the more time he has to think. Dean understands: the novelty of having Dean back is wearing off and now Sam got used to having gained what he wanted, he is beginning to think about what he actually fought for. What he sacrificed so much for.

Dean can only guess what Sam must feel when he looks at this cold, sunless world the remains of which he suffered so much to protect.

A crow is calling out nearby. Dean turns towards the sound and decides to let it determine the direction he’ll walk in. The moss and fallen leaves dampen the sound of his footfalls and once the crow falls silent, there is nothing to be heard but Dean’s own breathing.

Little white clouds from in front of his face, barely visible in the fading light. That hadn’t happened a week ago. It’s definitely getting colder.

Soon, all the leaves will have fallen and this place will look as dead as the rest of the world. Perhaps it will never get warmer again. Cas once said that it used to be so much hotter, and Dean imagines the temperatures sinking gradually, over the course of centuries, never stopping their decline until they reach total zero and this planet becomes a snowball drifting through space.

There is odd comfort in that. They would win the war by removing the battleground along with all the players.

But of course, before that happened they would freeze, or starve, or die in one of the ten thousand other way that eternal winter could kill them, and then Lucifer would get a hold of Sam and never let him go.

Not to mention that the world dying would render Sam’s long struggle vain; there is a reason why he’s fighting other than pissing off the angels, after all – though here, in this quiet, fading place its easy to forget that.

The crow calls again – or maybe it’s a different one. Dean changed directions, not even sure what he’s actually looking for. They don’t need any food at the moment, though the cold helps converse anything they kill, so it doesn’t hurt to have a stock of supplies. Perhaps Dean should have brought a bag instead of the spear, so he could collect fruit for Sam. Not that he eats much so what they have will last a while, but there’s no telling how much longer they’ll even find anything. Most apples don’t grow in winter.

With his inability to eat meat, Sam will be the first to starve.

Grimly, Dean walks on. He should check the traps they laid out for rabbits, he decides. At least then he can pretend there was an actual practical reason for him to leave, other than just running from his brother (again).

By now it’s completely dark, and he’s actually glad the trees have lost much of their leaves; at least the dark-grey night sky offers enough light to make out the trees he’d otherwise bump into.

He’s also glad that he has a good sense of direction, otherwise he would get hopelessly lost and never find the way back to the cave, let alone the rabbit traps. Dean knows the area, though. He can move safely enough even in the dark.

He just wishes he had his leather jacket, because at night it’s really fucking cold.

Since he originally started off into the wrong direction, it takes him a while to find the snares he laid out the day before. And it’s dark enough that it’s the sound, rather than he sight, that alerts him to that fact that he’s not the only one who found them.

It’s not a rabbit struggling against the hold of a snare he hears in the quiet of the night. It’s something much bigger, with sharp teeth that found the rabbit and is now eating it. Dean can hear the soft sound of little bones being cracked, the wet tearing of flesh. And then a growl, followed by another one, as the creature eating gets company and insists on its right.

Wild dogs, at least two of them. Dean holds his spear a little tighter and takes a step back. This is not what he anticipated when he came here, and since when are these things hunting at night, anyway? He’s going to retreat, as quietly as he can, and hope they are too distracted by the meal they have to bother with the one that’s getting away.

He manages to take all of two steps backwards and turn around before he spots the other dog that’s standing between the trees, a dark outline before an almost as dark background. He can see its eyes gleam, though. He can see that it’s big. Wolf-big.

It’s looking at him. And it growls.

Dean swallows. And lifts his spear.

He senses the movement to his left more than he sees it. Throws himself to the side and brings up the spear in a movement that’s more instinct than anything else. The dog (wolf?) that jumped him is impaled in the side and gives a sharp yelp before hitting the ground.

The spear is stuck in its body and the momentum carries it away, out of Dean’s grasp. He rolls over and jumps back to his feet but the first attack was the attack-signal for all three of them and he has to let himself fall backwards the moment he’s upright, bringing up his foot and kicking away the wolf, sending it flying past it’s goal. He hears the snapping of its jaws as they close inches before his throat.

The wolf lands hard but gets back to its feet in seconds. Just enough time for Dean to throw himself to the limp body of the one he killed and wrap his hands around the spear. He might even have been able to pull it out of the cadaver but the third wolf suddenly jumps on his back, pushing him over. Dean manages to bring up his arm to protect his throat but that’s all he can do. The animal’s teeth sink into his flesh, he can’t move, and the last wolf is coming for him. He’s helpless. It’s over.

But the expected final snapping of teeth doesn’t come. Instead there’s a yelp, and the one biting Dean’s arm lets go and jumps away. Dean rolls over immediately, getting up. He takes in the other wolf, lying on its side and twitching, but not getting up. Then there’s a hissing sound in the air and the final wolf falls over. Dean stares at the arrow sticking out of its neck. Then he turns and stares at Castiel.

“What the Hell are you doing here?” It’s probably not the appropriate things to say, given the circumstances. It’s just the first thing that comes to Dean’s mind.

“I believe the words you are looking for are ‘Thank you for saving my life’,” Castiel kindly informs him. “I came because you forced me to by running around out here in the dark. And it’s fortunate that I did.”

“I could handle it.” Dean wraps his hand around the wound in his arm. Funny, it doesn’t hurt that much. It might be shock, or just the cold numbing him. “What were you thinking, leaving Sammy alone like this?”

“Sam made me go after you. If I hadn’t, he would have gone himself.”

“That doesn’t even make sense. You had no problem with me leaving in the first place.”

“Because we thought you’d merely gone to relieve yourself.” Castiel steps closer. “You’re hurt.”

“It’s nothing.” Dean picks up his spear and looks around but only sees darkness. “Think there are more of them here?”

“I wouldn’t count on there being none. What were _you_ doing here?”

“Checking the traps.” Dean is well aware how idiotic that sounds.

Cas is only a shadow in the darkness. “At night?”

“I needed some fresh air, okay? It can get pretty stuffy inside that cave. Now let’s go back before Sam gets the idea to come looking for us.”

“Sam’s not...” If Cas wanted to say that Sam’s not that stupid, he thinks better of it. “We will take the dogs,” he decides. “They shouldn’t go to waste here.”

The thought of running all the way back with a cadaver under his one good arm doesn’t exactly thrill Dean. But he can see the point: if they leave the bodies here, they will be eaten or gone tomorrow.

Still. They are heavy and Dean is injured. This isn’t going to be fun.

Stepping over to the one that bit him, Dean must admit that upon closer inspection it’s not quite as big as he thought it was when it was sitting on him. Definitely a dog rather than a wolf. But the one Cas is picking up over there, that one is definitely a wolf.

He was nearly eaten by wolves. That’s new. Dean’s been nearly eaten by werewolves a hundred times, but the genuine article, that’s something else.

They end up leaving one of the animals behind. The wolf Cas is carrying on his shoulders doesn’t leave much room for anything else and Dean has enough trouble dragging his dog behind single handedly.

The direct way back is shorter than the way Dean came, but they still need half an hour, with Dean having to take a break every so often and beginning to understand how Sam was feeling on the way to this place. He’s out of breath, he’s cold, his arm is hurting worse with each step and all his senses are fixed on the forest around him, just waiting for the next attack.

 

-

 

Their makeshift home is barely visible in the dark. If Dean didn’t know it’s there he wouldn’t be able to find it, since the walls of the hut blend in with the trees and block all the light that shines from the fire inside. There is a faint glimmer of light, though, coming from the entrance of the cave; it’s visible only when someone pushes open the door of the hut and steps out.

Dean tenses, his first thought that they have been found. But they haven’t. It’s just Sam, limping outside with a staff in his hand that’s either a walking aid or a weapon or both. They can see his silhouette as he stops for a moment and looks around, then takes off.  
Dean is about to call him when Sam stops again, listening. Eventually he turns towards them.

Before the background of the forest they have to be invisible to him.

“Dean…?” he calls carefully. “Cas?”

“You’re an asshole, Sam,” Dean snaps. “Get the hell back in there! What the fuck are you thinking? You think it’s gonna help anyone if you get lost in the dark and freeze to death while we’re freezing our asses off looking for you and are eaten by wolves?”

Sam is silent for a moment. Long enough for Dean to get to him and grab his arm, dragging him back towards the cave. (Sam’s wearing his leather jacket.) After a few steps Sam shakes him off. “You’re the one who left,” he says without emotion and walks back inside before them.

He doesn’t even notice the proud harvest of the night, or if he does, he doesn’t comment on it. Which means he didn’t notice, because the bodies of two bloody predators carried as trophies by someone who didn’t go out to hunt usually prompt a few questions.

They leave the animals upside – inside the hut and thus protected from other predators, but out of the warmer cave. Dean slides down without elegance and with a hiss of pain, and only then, in the light of the fire, does Sam notice that he’s covered in blood and bleeding.

“What the hell happened?” he asks, coming over from where he was getting ready to pout. This time it’s him who drags Dean onwards, towards the fire where the light is better.

“I was nearly eaten by wolves,” Dean tells him proudly. “Then Cas saved my ass,” he adds, somewhat less proudly.

Sam stares at him – he clearly did not see that coming. “He didn’t save your arm, though,” is all he says, however. “Any other injuries?”

“Just to my ego. Leave it, I can take care of it myself.”

As expected, Sam ignores him. He peels away the blood soaked fabric of Dean’s shirt and probes at the bite marks, making his brother hiss. “Pretty small wolf, I gather.”

“Might have been one dog among them. It was still big and mean.”

“I’m gonna clean this.” Sam is all business today. If Dean thought him nearly dying off screen would fix what’s wrong between them, he finds himself sorely disappointed.

So Sam cleans Dean’s wound while Cas fucks off again, for whatever reason. And well, this would be a great chance for the brothers to have a little talk in private, except Dean doesn’t really want to have this talk. What is he supposed to say? Sorry?

Sam’s hands are trembling, and up close Dean can see the slight crookedness of his fingers and the scars. There is one running over the back of his left hand and around the side to his palm that especially stands out. It must have gone down to the bone or deeper and left a ragged canyon in Sam’s flesh. Looking at it suddenly fills Dean with an infinite sadness.

He doesn’t say anything because there are no words.

Despite his anger and weakness, Sam works as efficiently as ever. He gets the wound clean and it hurts like a bitch, but that’s hardly Sam’s fault. They don’t have alcohol to disinfect it, which worries Dean a little – if there’s one thing they don’t need it’s him going down sick or even losing his arm – and there’s a nice thought right there – because of infection, and yeah, going out alone, at night, unprepared, was kind of stupid.

In his defense, they never ran into trouble with the wild dogs before. The beasts find enough food around here and don’t bother getting in trouble with the human residents. Except of course they don’t know humans at all and never learned to fear them. Perhaps it was time they were taught a lesson.

They weren’t the only ones learning something the hard way, though. The wound in Dean’s arm is deep in places, the flesh torn, which will make sewing it together a bitch. Also, loss of limb is a possibility. There was a reason why they didn’t fuck around with wounds like this when they were younger, even in the company of a father who generally thought one had only reason to complain if the limb was already gone.

When they were kids, Sam had been bitten by the dog of a man possessed by a spirit and not told them because he didn’t want John to shoot the animal. With John hitting the bar right after the hunt and Dean in the throes of puberty, it had taken them two days to notice. Dean would never forget his ten-year-old brother being uncharacteristically quiet and then just collapsing, without warning, from one moment to the next.

Dad had been so angry with him for not telling them. He would have grounded Sammy for life if Sam wouldn’t have actually liked that because it would have meant he got to do his homework in peace.

It’s funny how Dean can look back with fondness now on something that scared him shitless when it happened.

He’d never been able to be angry with Sam when he was sick. Not then. Maybe he hadn’t ever looked at his suffering brother and felt fury gnaw at his insides rather than pity and concern before Sam was detoxing from demon blood the first time. And, unfairly, the second time, too.

Now, when he thinks about how according to Cas Sam pulled all the stops and dosed up on demon blood to turn himself into a frigging weapon with absolutely no regard for himself or the general state of his soul, all Dean feels is crushing guilt.

At least Sam was spared the withdrawal this time. Dean can only guess that that is a side effect of his long time riding shotgun in Cas’ vessel, but he knows he will be damned before he lets his brother do that to himself again, no matter how much easier it made the fight against demons. Dean doesn’t plan on throwing Sam into battle anytime soon anyway.

Cas comes back after just a few minutes. He sits on the other side of the fire, a little wooden bowl in his lap, and starts to do something with it. Dean isn’t really paying attention, because he’s lost in memories, in pain, and in guilt. And wanting to get his brother back, the way he was. The brother who was just glad to have Dean back and not thinking about how he lost him in the first place. No, not even that – he wants his brother back the way he was when Dean left him in the first place. He wants a Sam who has faith in him, and he wants to not fuck it up.

Looking back from this great a distance, it’s hard to say how he could ever believe he had to do what he did. Or maybe that’s just because of Sam, sitting beside him without ever having given in and proving Dean wrong in everything he based the damnation of the world on.

“It’s done,” Cas suddenly says, pulling Dean out of his thoughts. He looks up and sees the fallen angel hand the wooden bowl to Sam, who takes it over to Dean.

“Hold out your arm,” he says, and when Dean does so, he tips the bowl and a greenish liquid runs over the bite marks in Dean’s arm. At first he’s surprised by the cool, almost pleasant sensation. A second later he is surprised by the sudden, burning pain.

“ _Bloody fucking Hell!_ ” he curses, pulling his arm back. “Do you want to fucking kill me?”

“I thought that had been _your_ intention.” Sam sounds cool and distant like he does when he’s really pissed. He doesn’t look at Dean but puts the bowl down and takes something else that Cas gives him.

Cas says, “If you don’t like it we can always protect you from infection by cutting off your arm. But even that would leave a wound we would have to clean, so you would win nothing.” And great, now they are ganging up on him.

“For the record, I bloody hate you;” Dean growls at both of them. Sam just takes hold of his arm and pulls it up again.

“Can you hold it like this?” Now he doesn’t even sound cool or distant. He just sounds like Sam, wanting information.

So Dean holds up his arm and Sam holds up what Cas gave him: A needle for the sewing of clothes and a length of black thread. Not exactly perfect for fixing a wound but evidently all they have, and even that comes as a bit of a surprise.

“Where did you even get that?” Dean wonders.

“It’s old. I found it in one of the cities long ago. There is no shortage of supplies in some places, as long as you’re not looking for food. It always serves to have needle and thread with you,” Cas informs him. “Not the best for this purpose, but I lost the surgical needles I had a few years ago.”

“We should find a hospital the next time we’re in a city,” Sam mutters, his eyes fixed on Dean’s arm. “Stock up on whatever we can.” He sets the needle to his brother’s flesh and Dean braces himself for the pain, only to find he hardly feels it. The wound still burns from the liquid Sam poured over it, but it’s bearable now, and the burn almost completely drowns out every other sensation.

Sam works with quiet efficiency, if a bit slower than he used to. Within minutes he’s done and Dean is sporting a shiny new sewed-up wound that makes him look like a pirate. When he was five, he would have found it cool. Actually, he would still have found it cool with twenty-five. He flexes his fingers, rolls his wrist; it pulls a little, but otherwise it’s surprisingly okay.

“It’s going to hurt like a bitch in a couple of hours,” Sam tells him, as if he read Dean’s mind and wants him to know he’s not getting off that easily. Dean didn’t really think he would.

In the end Sam picks up the bowl again. Now the liquid is gone a dark paste remains that he smears on the wound. When he’s done, Dean sniffs on it and grimaces. “It stinks!”

“Not the worst that ever happened to you. This will numb the pain and keep infection away.” With that, Sam’s obviously done. He takes the bowl and a bottle of water and limps to the back of the cave to clean it. Dean turns to Cas.

“How do you know how to make this stuff? General angel knowledge?”

“Bobby showed it to us when civilization was going down,” Cas tells him. “He wrote books on it, too. His knowledge helps many, to this day.”

Taking a deep breath that doesn’t get the lingering smell out of his nose, Dean sits down beside the fire. In all that has happened after his memory returned, he hasn’t yet found a moment to grieve for his surrogate father.

One more thing he is to blame for.

“When I first met her, Jena told me about some ‘Saint Bobby’ who wrote a lot of books,” he recalls. “That was him, wasn’t it?”

“Yes.” Cas nods. “Though no one called him that while he was alive.”

“Yeah, I can imagine how that would’ve gone down.” Dean chuckles despite his sadness. He looks over to Sam, barely visible that far from the fire and either not hearing their quiet conversation or ignoring it. “You fixed Sammy up like this often?”

Cas nods again. “And him me. We became quite the experts on patching each other up. But I heal quicker and was never quite that popular a target.”

Dean nods wordlessly and looks over to his brother who is still working on getting the bowl clean with grim determination. This is Sam working through his emotions with physical exercise the way Dean used to work through his emotions with alcohol. This isn’t going to take him anywhere, but Dean’s can’t approach him about their issues. Not now. Maybe not ever.

He and Cas sit in silence until Sam finally is satisfied and puts the bowl away. He remains sitting where he is, though, just stares into space. Dean understands. He still would like for his brother to come over where it’s warmer.

Sam only does that after Dean moved to another part of the cave to busy himself with sorting through their supplies in the light of the slowly dying fire, dividing them into little piles that serve no purpose but to make it look like he’s not getting out of his brother’s way.

To his surprise Sam comes over. Not close like he would have, once, but close enough to make clear it’s Dean he wants. “You should go to sleep,” he says. “The paste on your wound has a slightly sedating effect. It will help you sleep through the worst of the pain.”

Dean stares at the piles of smoked meat and small, crippled looking fruit before him, a thousand words on his tongue. “Yeah,” he finally says. He is tired, and the nest of furs and blankets that serve as his bed these days starts to look very inviting. “You should lie down, too. You look beat.” It is basically Sam’s default setting these days. Dean’s brother doesn’t answer, but he walks over to his own nest and sits down, so Dean takes that as agreement.

When he closes his eyes a few minutes later, though, Sam is still sitting there, staring at the fire.

 

-

 

He wakes in pain. His whole arm seems to be on fire, and for the longest time this is the only thing he knows. The ground is too hard. His body aches and no matter how he moves he’s never able to find comfort. His tongue lies swollen in his mouth. He longs for water but he can’t move and he can’t speak.

There’s a cool hand on his brow, and then his head it lifted and something is set to his cracked lips. He greedily drinks the liquid that runs into his mouth, and falls back into darkness and nightmares when it is taken away.

It seems he floats forever. When he wakes again, it’s to the dim light of a dying fire and silence. For a long time he just lies there, half awake, half asleep, and listens without being aware. Eventually, awareness returns in full. He feels the call of nature and he’s thirsty. Dean tries to sit up but finds his limbs feel like lead. It takes him a moment to push himself to his arms and then upright.

“Sam?” he calls. His voice dies somewhere in his throat, the word leaving his mouth as a weak croak. “Cas?”

There’s no reply. He doesn’t see anyone. Suddenly, Dean is convinced that they moved on and left him behind.

“Dean.”

The voice sounding to his left makes Dean jump – he feels the sensation through his entire body, like an electric shock. Michael is sitting on the ground beside him, looking for all the world like a concerned parent. Dean vaguely recalls someone being there with him through the haze of his sickness and wonders, absurdly, if it was the angel.

He can feel his power and it’s nearly suffocating him.

“You’re sick,” Michael observes. “I could help you. You know I would.”

Dean stares at him, his mind unable to come up with a reply. His thoughts seem to move through mud.

Michael sighs. “You’re hard to reach these days. I would think that’s Gabriel’s doing. It’s quite the shame that he would choose to support your futile struggle. And quite inexplicable, don’t you think?”

Dean is still staring, still thinking, Jena left a long time ago. Maybe she’s not even coming back. Maybe she came and took Sammy and Cas and left again.

“My brother is easily bored,” Michael says gently, as if reading Dean’s mind. He can’t. He once said he can’t. “Constantly looking for ways to entertain himself. But he’ll get out before things become too inconvenient for him. That is the one thing you can rely on with him. This war, it’s just another playground. He needs to take things more seriously. But as an older brother, of course, I am glad he has his own best interests in mind and won’t get hurt.”

“Sister.”

“Come again?” Michael frowns, confused.

“Gabriel. He’s wearing a girl now. That makes him your sister.”

The smile Michael gives him in return is patronizing. “Actually, your language is lacking the correct vocabulary. For consistency’s sake, let us stick with brother. But I have not come to talk about Gabriel.”

“You’ve come to play the nice uncle again, now you Sammy got away from you once more? I bet you didn’t see that coming.” But where is Sam? Where is he?

“Do you know that your brother is dying?” Michael asks. “He’s not going to live much longer. His death will be painful, and then he will be with my brother until he gives in. All your “rescue” brought him is more unnecessary suffering. Dean, the only way to heal his body is for Lucifer to take over.”

“Only then it wouldn’t be Sam’s body anymore,” Dean points out. His thoughts are still sluggish, but he knows that. Sam giving in would be bad.

Why would it be bad again? The world would end, but then, the world ended long ago. And Sammy wouldn’t die… No. Sam would be gone. And he’d go with a feeling of defeat, and guilt, and hating himself.

Dean remembers hating himself, but also a feeling of perverted triumph because his brother, his friends thought they could manipulate him. Guilt-trip him into not saying yes. Well, he showed them, and Sam could eat all his unjustified faith and choke on it.

Bile splatters on the ground beside Dean’s blankets. On the other side of him, Michael waits patiently until he is done retching. (It’s amazing that even knowing what a dick he is, Dean apparently doesn’t want to puke on an archangel’s feet.)

“You have your memories back,” he says when Dean is able to listen again. “You remember why you agreed with me in the first place. How could you not see that you were right then?”

Dean’s head is full of water. He knows he has to tell that guy something, but he can’t think of what.

‘Up yours!’ might be a good start. But before he can say anything, darkness rises up inside him and directions leave his world. The last thing he sees is the ground rushing towards him.

 

-

 

“Dean? Can you hear me?”

The voice penetrates the silence Dean is drowning in. He tries to ignore it but it is quite persistent, and something, something tells him it might be a good idea to open his eyes.

There is a sharp, vile smell in the air. When Dean does open his eyes, he finds his nose centimeters away from a pool of vomit.

Retching again, he tries to move away, and strong hands take hold of his head and his shoulder, help him get up and away until he’s propped up on his elbows, barely keeping more or less upright.

“So that wasn’t a dream,” he croaks.

“What wasn’t a dream?” It’s Cas before him. He puts a bottle to Dean’s lips and Dean drinks greedily before answering.

“Puking.”

“No, I would believe that was very real.”

“But Michael wasn’t really here, was he?” If he was, well, if he was…

There’s a consequence to that thought but Dean can’t quite grasp it. He doesn’t like it, though.

“Michael?” Cas sounds alarmed now. “He came to you?”

“Yes. No. I mean, I think he did. In the way he does. Without being here. I hope. Did you see him?”

“I was outside for a minute. But I don’t believe he was here in person. He wouldn’t have disappeared like that.”

So Dean incorporated puking into his dream. Or his dream made him puke. It figures that Michael would have an effect like that. “I don’t think it was just a dream.” He shakes his head to clear it and wishes he could move away from the vomit. His clothes are soaked with sweat and make his shiver. “But why would he come now? He’s been silent for so long.”

“Gabriel put up protections around this place to keep Michael out of your mind. But they are weakening in his absence.”

“So he needs to come back,” Dean concludes.

“Or we have to leave. If he gets into your head it’s only a matter of time before they will find us if we hold still. This is bad. This is very bad.” There’s an undertone of desperation in Castiel’s voice, like having to leave now would be… Well. Really, really bad.

Dean looks around. “Where’s Sam?” he asks.

 

-

 

“You have been out for three days,” Cas explained. “We were very worried. I considered taking off your arm before the infection could spread further, but in the end it proved unnecessary.

Dean flexes his fingers and can’t quite comprehend that he’s lucky to still have them. That moving his hand or arm fucking hurts, that he does get.

It doesn’t matter, though.

“Sam took care of you until yesterday.” Cas says it like he thinks Dean will find consolation in the knowledge, and yeah, he actually does.

“What’s wrong with him?” Dean runs a hand through his brother’s hair. “He was doing fine when I got bitten.”

“He was never fine. And this… this is going to get worse.”

Cas wrings out the cloth and puts it back to Sam’s forehead. Dean’s brother is so still he looks dead. He doesn’t feel dead, though – even to Dean’s fever-warm skin he feels hot to the touch.

Suddenly Sam twitches. He throws his head left and right and fucking whimpers, then he falls still again.

“Does this mean that Lucifer can get into his dreams again?” Dean doesn’t like that thought. Sam is in no condition to face something like that.

Though maybe he should stop to see the world in terms of what Sam isn’t strong enough to face and start with himself instead. It’s not that, though. Dean isn’t worried Sam is going to say yes, this time. He’s just worried. About his brother.

“Did he see that I got better?” he asks.

“Yes. We knew you would live when he gave in.” That sounds like Sammy, alright – waiting for Dean to get better before getting worse himself. But Cas isn’t done yet. “Lucifer might make him believe you died, though.”

“Just fantastic. What’s wrong with me anyway? I thought your stinking remedy was supposed to help.”

“The wound was less clean than we thought. If it’s any consolation, Sam felt very bad about it.”

Dean can imagine. “This is the kind of shit you need a fucking hospital for. So it’s my own fault – I’m the one who destroyed those.”

Cas, mercifully, doesn’t say anything in return, and Dean is distracted anyway when Sam arches and screams. Together they barely manage to hold his fragile form still as he thrashes.

“What the fuck is wrong with him?” Dean yells. His own arms feel like putty. He’s useless here but he holds on as best he can anyway, and after a few seconds Sam falls still again.

( _‘Do you know that your brother is dying?’_ )

“It’s withdrawal.”

Dean looks up to see Jena stand inside the cave. She must have slipped in when they were distracted, and now she’s coming over, kneeling beside Sam and putting a hand to his forehead. Sam whimpers and tries to move away.

“Withdrawal?” Dean asks dumbly. He still has trouble following what’s going on. He just knows that his brother needs help. “But he hasn’t been using.”

“Are you kidding me? He used for decades. By the end the demon blood was the only thing keeping him alive. You’d expect the withdrawal after that to be a bit of a bugger.”

“But why now? It’s been…” Dean thinks but can’t put a name on the time that passed since Sam was brought back to life in this failing body. “… ages.”

“I protected him from this before. Suppressed the symptoms.”

“Well, then protect him now!”

“It’s impossible!” Jena snaps. “Even before, in a magically enhanced environment, I could only postpone it. Now there’s nothing I can do. He has to go through this.” She looks up, from Dean to Cas. “And we have to leave.”

“Dean’s been dreaming of Michael,” Cas says, as if in agreement.

“Yeah? Well, he always had terrible taste.”

“We can’t go now!” Dean feels like he’s still not really following. “Sam won’t make it.”

“You might be right. But he certainly won’t make it here. They may not yet know where we are, but they are homing in on us. Another two days and they’ll be here – and by that time I would like to be somewhere else entirely.”

“Well, _you_ could be. You could just zap away and leave us behind.”

“Don’t tempt me. You’re becoming more trouble than you’re worth. Do I need to remind you that _I_ am not getting anything out of this?”

“That’s what scares me. You’re not exactly known for your selfless sacrifices.”

“What, like you are?” Jena turns away and puts her small hands left and right of Sam’s face. He moves restlessly and moans, but doesn’t open his eyes. “We need to tie him down.”

“To what?” Dean gestures around the cave: Blank ground, blank walls, in the middle a fireplace. “Besides, don’t you think bonds would hinder him a little on the death march you’re planning to send him on?”

“As it happens, I have a solution for that.”

 

-

 

Jena’s solution is waiting for them topside. Dean climbs up with aching bones, weak limbs and anger pooling in his stomach to find two horses nibbling at the grass before their hut. There’s a carriage, too – just a simple thing with two wheels that offers two simple seats and just enough room for a tall person to stretch out.

“You’re kidding,” Dean says, but Jean is still downstairs and doesn’t hear him. But it seems safe to assume that she is indeed serious about this.

“I would believe this is why he was gone so long,” Castiel muses beside Dean. “It’s hard to collect things like this and transport them long distances without being tracked. He must have made a lot of detours.”

“If he can still zap around that freely, why doesn’t he just zap us elsewhere? To another convenient cave, or a house or whatever. Somewhere safe and warm for Sam to rest.”

“Because it would take any powerful angel only days to follow that trail. Gabriel can’t keep moving us constantly, and even if he could, this sort of travelling also takes its toll on the human body. No, to lose them again, we will have to move the conventional way.”

“Does that mean that the little bitch led the other dicks right to our doorstep?”

“They would have found us anyway. I’m frankly surprised it took them so long.” Castiel puts a hand on Dean’s arm. “Gabriel made his choice,” he says as if he read his mind. “He will stick with it.”

“I still don’t like it,” Dean growls unwillingly.

Castiel sighs. “Neither do I.”

 

-

 

“You just had to go and let yourself be gnawed on by a stupid dog.”

Jena isn’t happy about Dean’s injury and subsequent illness. Dean thinks he’s holding up quite well, though. Okay, so he was useless during the packing of their stuff, but he sat with Sam and held his hand and that was much more important anyway. Then he sat outside wrapped in a blanket and snapped at everyone while Cas carried Sam over and placed him on the carriage, wrapped in even more blankets and cushioned by anything and everything they could afford to give him.

So far he isn’t tied to anything, but wrapped as he is that might not even be necessary.

“I don’t like this,” Dean growls for the fiftieth time as he watches little white clouds form in front of his brother’s face with every labored breath. “This is far too cold for him. You’re going to kill him.”

“We wouldn’t do this if there was any other choice,” Cas points out for the fiftieth time. “He has better chances like this than he would have if we stayed.”

“He would have had even better chances if you hadn’t gone and gotten yourself sick,” Jena comments. “I tell you this once: if you fall off the carriage, we’re leaving you.”

“I won’t fall off before I’m dead, so don’t worry about that.”

“Oh, I’m not.”

Cas rolls his eyes at them. It’s a very Sam thing to do.

They managed to put most of their stuff onto the wagon left and right of Sam’s head, the rest has been put on the back of the horse not dragging the carriage. It’s not like they have a lot of luggage, but Dean and Cas created a few more weapons out of wood that are good enough not to want to waste them, and there’s a lot of food. Mostly wild dog and wolf, still waiting to be eaten for their crime of nearly eating Dean.

And water. They won’t always be so lucky to have a river right beside them. But then, bottled water won’t stay fresh forever either.

A stationary life is a lot easier than life on the road, especially if there is no car, no gas stations, motels and diners, and a very ill person to consider.

They leave just before dawn, with Cas in the driver’s seat of the carriage, Dean huddled and trembling beside him and Jena riding the remaining horse. Dean looks back to check on his brother who is whimpering every now and then, weakly thrashing his head left and right before falling still again. As Dean turns towards him a wave of dizziness washes over him and Cas has to grab his arm to keep him from falling off. Mercifully, Jena doesn’t say anything.

She does, however, snicker.

 

-

 

There are young leaves on the trees. Dean never really noticed before, but they are there, on more trees than not. They grow before the old ones even have fallen off, creating evergreen trees that shouldn’t be evergreen. Getting what little light they can all the time. Everything, it seems, adapts as well as it can.

This must be evolution in action, Dean thinks. It certainly isn’t God’s master plan.

 

-

 

It takes Dean until nightfall to accept that Jena is right: Things would have been a lot easier if he hadn’t gotten himself injured. In the face of Sam’s state, his own doesn’t seem all that dramatic, but it soon becomes obvious that he won’t get far like this. Everything hurts. As time passes he feels sicker and sicker and eventually he starts throwing up over the side of the carriage. His fever climbs again and he’s freezing. Cas has one arm wrapped around him constantly now to keep him from falling down.

He never complains. The one time he is offered a break he declines. They don’t have time for it. How urgent their departure was he can tell by the fact that they travel by night, when it’s coldest and they would by any rights need shelter.

They go on for a long time. Once they stop at a river – Dean doesn’t know if it’s the same that goes past the cave – and let the horses drink. Once, when Sam starts to get restless and is speaking incoherent words in no recognizable language Dean insists on them stopping so he can sit beside his brother and hold him until he calms down again.

They don’t move quickly, but they move steadily. After a while Dean sinks into a haze and time becomes meaningless. When he becomes aware of his surroundings again he is half-draped over Castiel and his head feels like it’s about to explode.

His arm, amazingly, feels like absolutely nothing. For a long moment Dean contemplates the possibility that it’s actually gone; that he passed out and they amputated it without asking. Eventually he dares to try wriggle his fingers. Pain explodes up his forearm and down to his hand. So at least it’s all still there – even though right there Dean kind of wishes it wasn’t.

At dawn it starts to snow. Tiny flakes are falling from the sky without sound and stay on the ground without melting away. They are a light grey rather than pure white. It seems like they are trying to cover all the trees and ferns and grasses and hide them from view so this place looks like all the rest.

Neither of them speaks. The silence that surrounds them is only broken by the horses’ footfall and Sam’s occasional cough.

It’s past midday when Jena steers her horse toward a small group of trees and bushes. They get as deep inside as they can with the carriage and set up camp. Cas frees the horse of its bonds, curls up with a blanket beside the wagon and falls asleep immediately. The trees keep away the snow, but it’s still too cold to be comfortable. Cas doesn’t seem to mind.

Dean crawls onto the carriage, stretches out beside Sam and wriggles beneath the blanket that’s on top of all the other blankets. The lack of space presses them against each other and even through layers of cloth and wool his brother’s body is like a furnace. So hot. Dean feels so cold, he’s sure he’ll bring Sam’s temperature down. Within seconds he is asleep.

Jena stands watch.

 

-

 

A punch to his leg wakes Dean what he thinks must be hours later. He opens his eyes to a dark world and everything feels so unreal that he half expects Michael to be the one punching him. But it’s only Jena, telling him to get his ass up so he can eat and drink something.

The parts of Dean not pressed against Sam are freezing cold even with the blanket. He’s unwilling to leave the warm spot he’s lying in and Sam whimpers when he sits up, moving weakly, seeking Dean’s warmth and closeness.

“Shh,” Dean mutters, cupping his cheek. “It’s okay.” He doesn’t even know why he did that. It’s not okay.

Despite the bitter cold, Dean leaves Sam his blanket as he crawls off. Cas is already waiting, gnawing on a piece of smoked meat with all the enthusiasm of someone who doesn’t feel like eating but knows he has to. Jena places more meat into Dean’s hands, as well as a bottle of water. “You lost liquid. Drink. Eat. We leave as soon as you’re done.”

Dean feels like eating as much as Cas does, with the addition of stomach cramps as soon as he tries. He gives up after a few bites and drinks the water instead. It’s ice cold, freezing him from the inside.

“Sam is starving,” he hears himself say as soon as he thinks it. “What are we gonna do about that?”

“Sam’s body had other problems than food now. His mind, too.”

Not good enough. “He’s still starving. He needs sustenance, something.”

“Then give him something he can digest.”

“What would that be?” Sam can’t keep anything down, he’s too sick. He’s not even conscious.

“Demon blood.” Cas answers Dean’s question without looking up. He gets to his feet and starts packing up and straps the horse Jena was riding yesterday before the carriage. Within minutes they are ready to go.

But Jena doesn’t mount the other horse yet. Instead, she takes a length of rope out of the backpack and walks over to Sam.

“What the hell are you doing?” Dean moves to stop her but she shakes him off.

“I told you we have to tie him down.”

“But we don’t! He’s been quiet all the time. He couldn’t move it he wanted to.”

“Won’t stay this way.” Jena’s face is grim and she doesn’t stop no matter what Dean does.

“Gabriel is right,” Cas says from his place up on the driver’s seat. “Sam will get much worse soon.”

“How do you know?”

“I’ve seen him go through withdrawal often enough.”

Dean has never seen his brother go through withdrawal. He locked him into a basement whenever it happened and only looked when it was over. Dean hears those words as clearly as if they had been spoken. Then again, maybe that’s just him.

The others are right. Of course they are right, because Dean’s life sucks and if there is any way to make it even worse it’s by being right with a pessimistic prognosis about his brother.

The snowfall continues all through the day. It gets worse, then better, but it never stops and soon the ground is completely covered in snow. The air’s too warm for it to stay forever, so the snow is kind of soft and squishy and melting right under the horses’ feet, but new snow falls faster than the old snow disappears and the result is a sloppy, sticky mass they that gets harder to travel through with every step, and isn’t that just awesome. If it doesn’t stop soon the carriage will get stuck and then they will get stuck, out here in the open with nowhere to go, and then they can take bets what will happen first: Sam and Dean freezing or the angels catching up with them.

And in all that Sam starts screaming, He starts thrashing; kicking at nothing with his aching legs and fighting against the bonds that are trapping his hands above his head and, fuck, rubbing his writs raw. Every now and then there is a knocking sound when his fingers hit the wood and Dean just wants to climb down there and sit on him.

He can’t, he just can sit up here and twist around trying to see Sam and sometimes reach down, take one of his hands but Sam always yanks them away and Dean doesn’t have the grip from here to hold on to him. Sam’s always slipping away.

He’s talking, too – delirious or hallucinating or Lucifer, Dean doesn’t know. He doesn’t understand either because it’s not a language that’s spoken on Earth, or shouldn’t be, anyway. The fuckers who speak it don’t belong here, and whenever Sam starts Cas and Jena throw worried glances at each other and frown and won’t tell Dean what the heck Sammy just said.

Sam screams “Ag!” and that, at least, Dean understands.

“It’s okay,” he says helplessly. “Gonna be okay.”

To his utter shock, Sam’s gaze focuses on him, all wide eyes and clear and focused, and he tells Dean something that sounds important and grave.

Dean shivers and turns back around.

“No,” Castiel says beside him.

“Wasn’t going to ask.”

They travel in silence for a while. Even Sam is quiet, mostly, until he starts coughing so hard he retches, but he doesn’t throw up, not yet.

How do Cas and Jena think they are going to handle the vomiting phase? Tie Sam so that his head hangs over the edge so he won’t choke on his own puke? They can’t stop for long, after all, not now it’s snowing. Need to go as far as they can while they still can.

“How does Sam even know Enochian?” Dean asks eventually, when the silence stretches too long and it seems the snow will swallow every sound. Leaving nothing. “Did you teach him?”

It’s not Cas who answers, it’s Jena. “Lucifer did.”

 

-

 

Sam starts throwing up not an hour later. They stop, just for a moment, so Cas can jump down and climb up and roll him around so he doesn’t suffocate, and Dean can jump down and fall onto his ass because his legs are numb and he’s still fucking sick. He nearly lost his arm three days ago and was out of his mind with fever two days ago. He hasn’t gotten the rest he’d need since then and he still has a fever and is always cold, but he can’t even think about that right now because Sam is maybe dying over there and Dean can’t help him.

Dean wants to run. He doesn’t want to see this, and it’s a shameful realization. It’s an instinct that goes against all his other instincts, one he doesn’t know where he picked it up from. Sam’s suffering and something in him seems to believe he can make it better by simply not looking. Like Sam only exists when Dean sees him so if Dean doesn’t see suffering there is no suffering, and isn’t that just fucked up.

Dean’s ass hurts. He’s been sitting on that wooden bench for far too long.

Behind him, Sam retches. And whimpers. And calls his name.

So Dean’s up in a second because there is one instinct that’s always been stronger than any other (should have been) and besides, pain? What pain? What dizziness? He’s got a carriage to hold on to and as long as that leads him right to his brother everything else doesn’t matter.

Cas is already sitting in the carriage, kneeling with his legs left and right of Sam’s body and Dean doesn’t know how to fit in there. He climbs on the wheel instead, very nearly falling off but somehow managing not to, and he’s leaning over the side and reaching for Sam who can’t reach back.

“I’m here, Sammy,” he says, loud and clear, so Sam will get it. “You’re gonna be okay.”

Cas looks at him and frowns a little at Dean standing there, precariously balanced on the wheel and bruising his hips on the side of the wagon, but he doesn’t frown at Dean reaching down to pat Sam’s shoulder and cheek and hair. In fact, he nearly smiles. Seems to be happy that for once, after two hundred years, when Sammy calls out for his big brother there’s actually someone to answer, and maybe for once he’s actually kind of happy that Dean’s back.

Sam doesn’t exactly calm down, but he stops calling, and fuck it, fuck the lack of space, Dean is going to ride with him in the back from now on. He’s going to sit there like Cas is sitting there and keep Sam warm and feeling safe and not-chocking on puke.

“That’s not a good idea,” Cas tells him when he proclaims his brilliant plan. Dean thinks it’s fucking glorious, and he doesn’t care if that’s the fever talking.

“Let him do it,” Jena decides. “We don’t have time to stop every time Sam eats backwards.” She never even left her horse.

“But Sam will-”

“Sam still has a little time. Let’s use it.”

There are once again speaking about something specific they don’t want to name, and this time Dean is maybe almost sure he knows what it is. He knows it’s bad, in any case, and as a result he doesn’t like thinking about it, so he doesn’t do that. For the longest time he’s happy to just sit with his brother as the carriage rumples on, wiping Sam’s face and turning him this way and that when he starts retching. For the first time he’s glad that Sam hardly has anything inside his stomach. He has Cas hand him a flat bowl from their luggage and puts it beneath Sam’s face whenever he needs to so his brother doesn’t have to lie in his own vomit.

Sam starts crying some time during the afternoon. There’s nothing Dean can do about _that_.


	13. Chapter 13

They make it until the dawn of the next day before they have to stop, which is pretty damn impressive, all things considered. Dean sleeps some when Sam is quiet, but he’s pulled awake by his brother’s tossing and retching every now and then and the night passes in a cold, shivering, miserable and worried haze. Eventually he wakes up because they picked up speed and that’s a first. They have never travelled at more than walking pace before now, to preserve the horses’ strength and because the ground hardly allows for more. While they are not going that much faster now, the increase in speed tells Dean two things: they are close to wherever they are going to stop and can afford to waste some energy, and they are really fucking in a hurry.

“What’s going on?” he hears himself asking, and all Cas, without turning, tells him is, “It’s time.”

“Time for what?” Dean looks down at his brother. Sam’s twitching softly every now and then, making strangled sounds in the back of his throat, and his bound hands are flexing, holding on to air, but none of that is new. Still, the sense of urgency is catching and driving all traces of lingering sleep out of Dean’s body and mind.

They keep up their speed for about ten minutes before they steer the horses into a canyon between walls of rocks left and right and have to slow down as the path gets narrow and winded. After a while they reach the point where the ground becomes too steep for the carriage and they have stop.

The moment they do, both Cas and Jena jump to the ground. Jena grabs all their blankets and tosses them to the ground under overhanging rocks that loom over them like giants, while Cas jumps onto the carriage, pushes Dean away and makes short work of the knots of Sam’s bonds. He gathers Sammy in his arms and places him on the blankets and then he fucking sits on him, knees left and right of Sam’s torso, and Dean can only watch with growing desperation and dread, not understanding what is going on.

Jena kneels down behind Sam’s head, placing her hands left and right of his face. “Dean,” she says without looking at him. “Collect some wood.”

Wood is important. Fire is important because warmth is important. But Dean recognizes an attempt to get rid of him when he sees it.

“No way in hell!”

“Please Dean.” Cas is pinning Sam’s wrists down to the ground with the weight of his body, but Sam isn’t fighting him, he isn’t. “You don’t want to see this.”

“What the fuck are you doing to my brother?”

“Nothing that hasn’t been done to him before,” Jena says with the usual lack of compassion in her voice, and great, if only that answer actually ruled out _anything_. “Now go and make yourself useful.”

“Tell me what you’re doing! What’s happening to him?”

“He’s going through withdrawal, and it’s about to become really bad.”

Really bad. As if it hadn’t been really, really bad before. Dean tries to imagine how much worse it can get without killing Sam and can’t come up with any reply he likes.

Cas lets go for a second, to take off his belt and stuff it between Sam’s unresisting teeth. “To keep him from biting his tongue off,” he explains needlessly and throws a pleading look in Dean’s direction, opening his mouth as if meaning to tell him to leave, again.

Then, out of nothing, Sam arches off the ground and _screams_. Cas’ hands clamp around his wrists like vices, and Jena holds his head still (and by the look of grim concentration on her face she’s doing more than just that) but the rest of Sam thrashes as if someone were electrocuting him and then something hits Dean square in the chest and throws him into the snow-covered dirt.

With a surprised yell he jumps back to his feet immediately, but whatever attacked him is nowhere to be seen. And Jena, who is facing Dean, only looks up briefly before turning her attention back to his brother. Cas doesn’t turn so neither of them is surprised.

And Dean remembers Sam’s first withdrawal, remembers him being thrown around Bobby’s panic room by his own goddamn powers and his stomach clenches. He thought that wouldn’t happen this time. Sam hasn’t used his powers in ages. Dean thought they were just gone.

His little brother has fallen still again, but his fingers are twitching and Dean knows that what happened just now was only the beginning. He knows this is going to _hurt_.

“Dean,” Cas pleads again. He sounds desperate. “You might get hurt. There’s nothing you can do. Just go. Until…” He stops to search for words, just for a heartbeat. “…it’s over.”

The second of hesitation tells Dean more than his words do. He clenches his fists and feels tears fill up his eyes and shakes his head. “I’m not leaving him alone.”

“Then stay, if you absolutely have to.” Jena’s tone makes clear that she’s letting Dean win this because they don’t have time for a discussion. “But stay over there. Don’t come closer, and don’t interfere. No matter what you see or hear or what happens to your brother. You get that? I swear, Dean, if you do anything but stand there quietly and watch, I’m going to kill you, and when Michael brings you back I’ll kill you again and again and again, and I’ll make Sammy watch!”

Dean swallows and nods. He’s not even sure he can stick to it, but he’s not leaving. Jena’s satisfied with that. She turns her attention back to Sammy who’s started arching again and is lifting rocks off the ground like he’s fucking Yoda, and everyone basically forgets Dean exists. Dean forgets it, too. His world narrows down to a very small spot and he’s not in it.

 

-

 

During the third fit, Sam throws stones around and this time it lasts. One of the stones hits Dean in the shoulder before Jena starts mumbling in Enochian and digs her hands in Sam’s hair and she’s doing something to him, Dean knows she is because all the stones fall back to the ground like they never moved and Sam twitches and screams and screams and screams, the kind of scream Dean only ever heard in Hell and the only reason why he’s not over there tearing those bastards off his brother is because he forgets how to move his legs.

 

-

 

It ends with Sam coughing up thin, watery blood that runs down his chin and cheeks as he weakly tosses his head to the side. He didn’t drink demon blood in (one hundred and fifty-something years) weeks, so Dean can’t even pretend the blood is anyone’s but his own. Afterwards, he just kind of twitches until a shudder runs through his entire body, he seizes one last time and finally falls still. Only then does Castiel let go of his wrists to sink to the ground beside him with a weary sigh and a haggard face. Only then does Jena take her hand off him. Only then does Dean re-learn how to move.

 

-

 

During the time it happened, the snowfall stopped and night fell. Dean doesn’t notice either until much later, when he sits on the hard ground with his brother’s still body in his arms and when he does notice, he doesn’t care.

Sam’s skin is cold and clammy, his mouth open as if he were gasping for breath. But he isn’t. His breathing is audible, rattling, but so slow, so soft it’s barely even there, and Dean can’t believe he’s going to live. He just can’t.

Cas comes over after an hour or a year and Dean instinctively pulls his brother closer to bury his face in the dirty, overlong hair. Sam lies like a ragdoll in his arms, like a body that hasn’t gone stiff yet.

“For what it’s worth, I’m sorry,” Cas says. His voice is rough, exhausted. He went away for a while after it was over and Dean thinks he might have passed out somewhere but it doesn’t matter. “We wouldn’t have done that if it hadn’t been absolutely necessary. Sam has a chance now. He wouldn’t have had it otherwise.”

Dean thinks about telling his friend that he understands. That he can see how much it pains Cas that he had to hurt Sam like that. But he can’t bring himself to do it, just rocks his brother’s body back and forth and wonders if he’ll ever wake up again or simply slip away.

 

-

 

Sam stops being so damn cold when his fever returns with a vengeance just before morning. He begins to tremble softly and doesn’t stop, but it remains the only sign of life Dean can find.

At dawn, Jena takes him out of Dean’s arms and Dean maybe kind of snarls at her, but doesn’t do anything to stop her. He thinks he might but somehow, Sam just slips out of his grasp as if Dean had already given him up.

It looks kind of ridiculous, this small woman carrying such a tall body, but weakened from his sickness Dean couldn’t have done it, and neither could Cas. They watch from different sides of their makeshift camp as the archangel places Dean’s brother back in the re-created nest of blankets on the carriage and when she montions for them to come over, they do it without a word.

Dean climbs in with his brother and wraps himself around him, his ear close to Sam’s mouth so he can hear his rattling, wheezing breaths. He wants to hold him in the end. Hopefully, he thinks with dull detachment, Sam won’t hold on for too long after Lucifer pulls him back to Hell. He finally deserves some peace.

This time, Jena takes the place on the carriage while Cas climbs up the other horse with effort, hanging in the saddle like a wounded soldier during the American Civil War. Dean barely pays them any attention at all. He just listens to the sound of the horses’ feet on the hard ground, the rumble of the wheels, and drifts off with his little brother in his arms.

When he wakes up, it’s midday and they have stopped. He wakes to the sensation of Sammy being taken away from him and holds on, instinctively. His fingers grasp air and discarded blankets.

The blankets are taken as well just as he sits up with a small sound of distress escaping his throat. Cas gathers them in his arms and follows his former sibling up a natural path between the rocks – a dried out river bed if Dean is any judge. It’s snowing again, and very cold. Dean is shivering as he climbs off the wagon, takes the remaining blankets and follows the small, sad procession over uneven ground.

Considering the slow speed of the carriage, they can’t have gone far. Dean imagines Jena being keen on any yard they put between them and the place where they (tortured? killed?) helped his brother get through his withdrawal in an action that probably left traces for every supernatural creature out there to find. Beside that, the place had offered little shelter. It hadn’t been carefully chosen. It had merely been the first convenient place they could find when time ran out.

Dean gets that.

They walk for three minutes or four before they reach the entrance of another cave. This one is deep, and dark, and Jena waits patiently for Cas to spread the blankets on the ground before placing Sam on them. Dean covers his brother with the ones he was carrying and then searches for Sam’s hand between all the blankets and furs, faintly surprised to find it warm and alive.

He keeps sitting there, letting the others take care of everything. Jena leaves again, returns with the rest of their supplies, while Cas prepares a fireplace. Dean’s fingers are frozen, but Sam’s are not. Sam is burning up. (Sam is still breathing.)

When everything is done and the cave is filled with flickering light and slowly spreading warmth, Cas wraps a wolf’s fur around Dean’s shoulders and sits beside him, placing one hand on Sam’s forehead. Gently, like he was touching something unimaginably fragile and precious. Dean wants to slap it away, but even that desire is distant and he doesn’t move.

“We will stay here for a few days, if we can,” Jena declares, her voice sharp and inappropriately loud in the quiet. “I hid the horses and everything else.”

“And then?” Dean’s voice sounds bitter and alien, not like him. “We’re just going to keep running? Do we even…” He tightens his hold on Sam’s hand. “Will he ever wake up?”

“That remains to be seen.” Jena isn’t one for mercy, but her voice becomes softer as she adds, “If he doesn’t, there will be no point in running.”

Dean just nods. Wouldn’t run even if there were a point. He’s going to stay here, with Sam, until the end of the world.

Jena settles on the other side of the fireplace after that, crossing her legs, closing her eyes and thinking about whatever it is Jena thinks about when she’s not doing anything. Probably missing the old days. Dean can’t really guess and doesn’t really care. He thinks that Sam needs a hospital; medication, fluids, a machine to help him breathe. Something better than a cave in winter.

“What have you done to him?” he finally asks, and beside him Castiel jumps, either startled by the voice in the quietness or dreading the question. He takes a shaky breath that makes Dean look at him and notice uncaringly how pale and tired he looks.

“Sam’s powers were running wild. It happens when he detoxes.”

“And it would have drawn attention to us,” Dean guesses.

Cas nods. “Yes. So we had to contain it.”

“Contain it?”

“Inside him.”

Dean is overcome by the image of pouring burning petroleum into a gas tank. “Did you do that often when he was going cold turkey?”

“No. It was the first time.”

“Then how did you know it wouldn’t kill him?”

When Cas doesn’t reply, Dean has his answer. He closes his eyes.

“You need to understand,” Castiel eventually says, “that it was a choice between possible death and certain captivity and death. Though I took no pleasure from it, I would make the same choice again.”

“Yeah, you would,” Dean mutters. He can see the point, but can’t not resent it.

Their conversation ends there. They sit in silence until Cas lifts Sam’s blankets and crawls beneath them, curling around his friend to provide a little extra warmth (or maybe just to be near him). The rest of the day passes like that. Jena doesn’t once move and Dean feels beat, weary, every bone in his body hurting, and so worn out that he can’t summon the energy to lie down. He stares at Sam and Cas a lot, pressed against each other under blankets and furs, equally unaware and defenseless. When he finally falls asleep himself, he doesn’t even notice it.

At some point he wakes up, his limps stiff with cold, and only manages to instinctively crawl beneath the blankets with his brother before drifting off again.

When he wakes up next it’s to the sound of Sam’s coughing and Sam clutches Dean’s hand as blood runs down his chin.

 

-

 

Jena disappears a lot, like she tends to do. But unlike in the last cave they stayed in, this time she always returns, bringing water, food, even more blankets that help Dean and Cas get more comfortable as they sit vigil or create weapon and tools and clothes out of wood and animal skins and lack of anything else to do. Dean doesn’t know where she gets them, but supposes it must be the same place she gets the cans of food she keeps bringing them, like a damn mother bird feeding her chicks. Maybe there’s a city nearby, really nearby. Walking distance. Dean doesn’t believe that for one second. This is one of those Gabriel-things she pulls sometimes, and he’s not going to complain, because the cans offer a nice variation to their food plan, even though he’s secretly convinced some of them contain cat food.

Sam doesn’t eat, or course. He coughs, and curls around his blankets, half buried in them and half kicking them off, and bleeds from his mouth and nose a lot. Most of the time he’s barely conscious, but Dean talks to him anyway, taking comfort in the illusion that it might help his brother remember he’s still here. Jena does what she does to keep him from starving and Cas makes himself useful in useless practical life-in-the-caves ways and gives them their space, except when he doesn’t. Days pass that way.

And days it takes for Dean to slowly, cautiously accept that Sam might get through this, against all probability, alive. It’s Jena’s doing, he’s sure of that, though she rarely touches his brother. And as much as he hates having to be grateful to Gabriel-the-dick, there’s only so long he can hold on to a grudge in the face of his brother’s survival.

Still, he isn’t too sad that she is gone for long periods of time. Never full days, but often enough from dusk till dawn or dawn till dusk. What exactly she does when she isn’t raiding buried supermarkets for canned food is beyond him, but he’s come to accept that it’s probably something helpful.

It raises the question of what Michael and Lucifer are up to at this moment; what they do in order to find them and how close they are to succeeding. Jena doesn’t answer questions like that and Dean doesn’t ask often. For the moment, he’s content with not having any angels invade his dreams. They aren’t homing in on them yet, at least.

“I have a question,” Dean says one afternoon, while he sits with a blanket around his shoulders in the mouth of the cave, his fingers slowly raking through his brother’s hair while Sam stares into the flames of the fire with glassy eyes and gives no indication of being aware of what is going on around him. (He’s sprawled in a way that always makes it impossible for Dean to tell if he’s comfortable with the temperature or simply too weak and apathetic to curl up against the cold.)

Castiel interrupts his work of clearing the handle of his new and improved crossbow of potentially lethal splinters to throw him a slightly sour glance. “Obviously. You wouldn’t talk to me otherwise.”

Dean ignores the criticism. “Lucifer isn’t going to let Sam go once he gets a hold of his soul, right?”

“That is our best guess, yes.”

“Why didn’t he do that before? All those times he had Sam in Hell and at his mercy – why did he always let him go again? He could simply have left him with his demons until he gave in. It would have been much quicker.” Dean hates the fact that he knows this, but this is what he, what the demon he was on the verge of becoming himself in Hell, would have done.

Castiel hesitates with the answer. Either he never thought about this before or he once again doesn’t want to give an explanation.

Or it’s complicated. Because when he speaks, his first words are, “I believe the reasons are complex.”

“Well, speculate away. Lucifer is your brother, not mine.”

Dean’s words earn him a glare. Castiel doesn’t identify with his brothers anymore; certainly not with this one and certainly not the way Dean does with his.

“Time is relative,” the fallen angel tries. “Being in Hell would have broken Sam quicker in regard to the world of the living because time moves faster there. But if Lucifer is in Hell and ten years pass there, then he has lived through ten years, even if on this plane they seemed like ten days. What difference does it make to him?”

It’s a good point. Dean’s forty years certainly didn’t feel like four months. “He could have stayed up here and left Sam to his demons. Shortcut.”

Cas nods. “This is where the reasons become abstract.”

“Do I have to beat the answers out of you? Or do you just like to make me ask every ten seconds?”

Cas sigh is somewhere between irritated and sad. “Lucifer… likes Sam. In a manner of speaking.”

“What manner?”

“He’s obsessed with him.”

That sounds pretty dirty, but then, after a few decades of rape and torture, what doesn’t? “Sam’s his vessel. Of course he is.”

“Not like that. Michael never felt the same way about you. He might be interested in you, might even care in a way, but in the end his affection doesn’t go beyond mere practicality. For Lucifer it’s different. He hates the human race with a passion you can’t begin to imagine. Your species disgusts him and that disgust mixes with his jealousy and outrage over God choosing you over us. In all that, Sam is the one human he feels any kind of connection to. He respects him, maybe admires him, even.”

“Yeah? Then I don’t want to see how he treats someone he doesn’t like.”

“Lucifer has no patience for those he doesn’t like. At best, they serve as temporary entertainment. He would never waste as much time on them. But with Sam… Every time he tried to break your brother and failed, his respect grew and so did his obsession with defeating him. But he has to do it himself. He hates the demons even more than the humans. He’d never allow one of them the honor of being the one to finally break Sam’s will. And he thinks it below Sam to be broken by a demon. He should only ever bow to the most powerful and beautiful of angels.”

Dean sighs warily. Leave it to his little brother to make the Devil fall in love with him.

“So what changed? Satan’s more willing to share now?”

“Michael is getting impatient. I think Lucifer almost enjoyed this game. But his brother wants Sam broken so they can finally end this, and if Lucifer doesn’t break him, he will.”

“So the demons it is? How is that better?”

“You’re wrong. If Lucifer gets hold of Sam, no demon will touch him. He will take him so deep into Hell no angel could ever reach them, and he will take his time. If that happens, Sam should give in at once. There would be no point in fighting anymore because Lucifer wouldn’t let him go until it’s over.”

Sam whimpers softly and moves, pressing his face into the fur he’s lying on. Dean pulls the blanket he kicked off earlier up around his brother’s shoulders and wonders if Sammy is more aware of what they are talking about than he thought. He hopes not.

“And after that?” he asks bitterly. “Will he be obliviously stored away in his own body or is there another eternity of torture waiting for him?”

“Neither.” Cas shakes his head. “Once he gave himself over to Lucifer, Lucifer will take care of Sam. He will be nothing but gentle and kind and Sam will be revered like no other human has been before. No one else will ever touch him.”

Dean feels slightly sick, but whether that is because Sam is facing an existence as the most adored pet in the history of the universe or because that would still be so much better than anything else that can and will happen to him, he doesn’t know.

He just knows that soul mates or not, there will be no shared Heaven for them. It used to be the one thing Dean clung to: that one day, no matter how far in the future, they would be together again. But it’s not going to happen. Even if Dean goes to Heaven, Sam never will. For the first time, death truly will part them, forever.

 

-

 

The next morning, at dawn, Sam wakes up fully for the first time in days. His groan wakes Dean from a nightmare and he gets his act together just in time to help his brother sit up so he can throw up all he likes without choking on it. Not that there would be anything in his stomach to be brought up, but his stomach doesn’t seem to care about that.

The retching wakes Cas who sits up and watches. Dean can see his outline in the weak light falling in through the mouth of the cave.

The outline moves and then the fire is lit with an ease that either comes from millennia of practice or from residual angelic powers. Dean is not bad with campfires himself, but usually he needs to at least _try_.

Sam hangs heavily in Dean’s arms, his hair falling into his face. Dean reaches out with one hand to brush it away and hold it back some. They will have to cut it at some point. It doesn’t do anything but get in the way.

When he is finally done, Sam just keeps hanging there. The only indication that he’s not puking anymore is the fact that he’s not puking anymore.

But when Dean carefully lays him back down, his eyes are open and clear, looking at his brother. He doesn’t say anything, though. Instead, he starts to cry, soundless, strengthless sobs shaking his feverish body.

“Shh,” Dean murmurs, stroking his hair. “It’s over. Only gonna get better now.” He slips his arm behind Sam’s neck and lifts his head when Cas brings a bowl of water. Sam manages a couple of sips before he starts to choke on it. His eyes drift shut and he’s asleep before Dean has lowered his head back to the ground.

“He’s gonna be okay, right?” Dean asks the fallen angel crouching before him. “Tell me he made it.”

“He made it through the worst of it,” Cas agrees carefully. “But it’s going to take time. And…” He trails off and shakes his head.

“And…?” Dean insists.

“Nothing. It’s not important.”

“Everything to do with Sam is important,” Dean tells him, but Cas gets up and leaves the cave instead of elaborating, and since following him would mean leaving Sam alone, Dean has no choice but to let him go.

 

-

 

‘And’, it turns out a day later when Jena is back from wherever she was and after Sam has alternated between screaming nightmares and dry retching for a couple of hours, was short for, ‘And since Sam has basically been living off demon blood for the last couple of decades, it’s pretty likely that he won’t be able to live off anything else now, even if we can get him to actually eat.’

“But he’s been eating before,” Dean reminds the two angels who are looking all grave and pessimistic and ready to go slaughter a demon or two for supplies. “And he hasn’t been craving… I mean, I know what Sam looks like when he _needs_ -”

“It was different before,” Jena interrupts him. “I was able to keep the addiction and the withdrawal away from him for a while, but that time has run out now. And he hasn’t been eating, he’s been nibbling at food. Without me, he would have starved weeks ago.”

“Then keep helping him!” Dean throws a look over to his brother who lies beside him, more or less awake but too miserable to participate in the discussion.

“I wish I could.” Jena shakes her head. “But there’s only so much I can do. Sooner or later he will need to sustain his body on his own. And there is no guaranty that normal food will do the trick.”

Dean’s mind works frantically. Everything in him screams not to let a drop of that poisonous stuff anywhere near his brother, but if Sam dies without it, how would that help him? “He just detoxed,” he says helplessly. “You nearly fucking _killed_ him with it! He’s off the stuff.”

“He’ll never be off it,” Cas says sadly. “It’s not just the addiction. Demon blood changes you.”

“I know. It taints the soul. And when Sam dies he will go straight to Hell.” Unable to sit still any longer, Dean gets up and starts pacing. “What help would that be?”

“Well, it might postpone his end long enough for us to save the world, to name one advantage,” Jena snaps. “This isn’t just about you or Sam, Dean. But since you’re unable to care about anything else, how about this? If we win, I will make sure his soul gets to Heaven. I’ll take it there myself and keep it safe forever if I have to.”

Dean stares at her, then at Cas, but Cas won’t meet his eyes. “You can’t be serious. If you planned to just get back to feeding him the stuff, why did you have to let him go through the withdrawal in the first place?”

“Sam knew what was coming for him,” Jena explains. “We spoke about it briefly before we left the shelter. I told him I couldn’t keep it away forever and that he was probably going to die without it, but he wanted to try.”

“You could have fucking force-fed him!”

“True. So there’s the additional problem of that being potentially lethal as well.”

Dean feels like punching the wall. Just how did his brother get so fragile? “You’re not making sense.”

“Demon blood is strong,” Cas says before Jena can. “In his weakened state it might be too much for him to handle. We will have to start slowly. Find a demon that’s weak and prepare his body for the stronger stuff he will need.”

Dean closes his eyes and feels unexpected tears run down his face. He doesn’t bother wiping them away. “So it’s been decided, then? And Sam doesn’t get a say in it?”

“Nothing’s been decided yet,” Jena informs him. “We’re merely preparing you for the possibility. Sam doesn’t want to use, so we’ll try it his way first. But chances are it won’t work, and before we let him die we’re going to fall back on the blood. Remember what will happen if he dies.”

As if there was any chance for Dean to forget that.

“And of course there are the practical reasons to consider.”

Cas flinches and glares at Jena as if he’s pissed at her for bringing it up, but Jena determinedly ignores him and stares at Dean.

“Practical,” Dean spits. “Right.” He finds himself standing protectively before Sam who gives no indication of having heard a word they said.

“Sam on demon blood is an effective weapon against demons. He’ll give us much better chances of winning this than a barely alive ragdoll we have to drag around.”

Dean doesn’t like punching girls, but seriously, it’s fucking _Gabriel_. It takes effort not to. “My brother is not a fucking tool you can use.”

“No, but he could be. And he should. If it’s any consolation, he had no qualms about turning himself into exactly that before you came back. It’s only for you he doesn’t want to anymore, and let me tell you, he’s accepting an awful lot of suffering for that, so good job there, big brother!”

Dean throws a helpless look at Castiel, but Cas still looks down as if in shame. “You’re fucking agreeing with this!”

“Dean…”

“No, fuck off.” Dean wants to storm out, but no, there’s no way he’s going to leave Sammy alone with them right now. Instead he glares at them until Cas gets up and leaves and takes the archangel with him who looks like she feels irritated for having to indulge the kid.

 

-

 

The evening after the demon blood discussion, Dean fills the cave with an aura of Stay the Fuck Away that wards off the angels, and heats water over the fire until it’s steaming and almost boiling. He undresses Sam, stretches him out on his own blankets and washes him with a cloth, taking care to rub off the spaces between all fingers, all the toes. Sam is only half awake, but he leans into Dean’s touch and the cloth, and Dean knows how important it is for his brother’s general wellbeing to feel clean, or at least not disgusting.

Sam shivers, though, so Dean rubs him dry quickly and wraps him into a blanket before he take his knife and starts on Sam’s hair.

It’s been such a long time since he last cut his brother’s hair, and that wasn’t with a knife in a cave, but the knife is sharp and there are no bathrooms anymore. Sam is drowsy and doesn’t seem to care. Dean cuts until the longest strands only just touch Sam’s shoulders (because otherwise he wouldn’t look like Sam anymore) and then uses what’s left of the water to wash what’s left of the hair.

When he’s done, he dresses Sam into the cleanest clothes he can find and puts him back into the nest of dry blankets he took him from. Sam blinks at him, weak as a kitten, and Dean pats the scarf he wrapped about the still damp hair and says, “It’s gonna be okay.”

 

-

 

The first thing Sam does when being able to move again is not much different from the first thing he did when he first woke up: he drags himself to his feet with help of the cave wall while Dean is still trying to leave sleep behind, stumbles outside and falls to his hands and feet retching.

Dean is there just in time to keep him from landing face first in the pitiful puddle of gall on the rock. He pulls his brother against him and his brother begins to sob helplessly.

“Come on, let’s get you back inside,” Dean says gently. “It’s fucking freezing out here.” But Sam shakes his head, refuses to move, and Dean has no choice but to leave him his will because Sam wants so little.

Cas comes out after a minute, hands Dean a couple of blankets and disappears again. They still aren’t on speaking terms, and the fact that Cas does his best to be useful without getting on Dean’s nerves tells Dean that the fallen angel knows that for once he is the asshole in the arrangement.

Doesn’t seem to make him rethink his opinion, though.

Dean wraps one of the blankets around Sam’s shoulders and the other around his own. It’s still cold, and he keeps his brother pulled against his side where the skinny body fits in a way it hasn’t done since Sam was seventeen and his muscles started to catch up with his height.

Sam leans against him for warmth or comfort and doesn’t say anything. Speaking is even harder for him than staying awake is, so they haven’t yet had any meaningful conversation and Dean doesn’t know where they stand with each other. There are still so many things they have to work through and he isn’t sure if they ever can.

He hates the part of him that is glad Sam is too weak to hate him right now.

“They’re right, you know,” Sam says quietly. Whispers, really. Dean considers not having heard him. He doesn’t want to have this discussion now, or ever.

“Shut up, Sammy,” he replies gruffly. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Dean.” Sam sounds helpless. He doesn’t have the strength for this and he needs Dean to make it easy for him but Dean can’t.

“You were fucking asleep. You didn’t hear anything.”

“Heard every word. I just couldn’t… couldn’t…”

Could react, couldn’t move, or speak, or maybe think, but it’s still there like every shitty thing that ever happened to them. Dean gets it. “It’s okay, Sammy.” He pulls him closer to shield him from the cold and the world.

“But they’re right.”

“No, they’re not.” Dean’s voice is hard, too harsh. All those days, those hours hearing Sam scream, and it was all for nothing? “You want it? That’s it?”

Sam twitches, bites his lip. “Always.” And wow, he’s not even trying to lie about it, and is Dean supposed to feel better now? “But that’s not the point. I can control myself.”

“Like you did with Ruby?” Dean has no right to be cruel here, none at all, and it’s not like he wants to, but he can’t help himself. It’s like he wants to make himself feel like shit, and he feels even more like shit when Sam looks at him with moist eyes and says in his barely-there voice, “Like every day after.”

If Dean really wants to make himself feel like scum, he found a faithful helper in Sam, because Sammy resisted the craving for so fucking long without complaint and without getting any credit for it when Dean can’t even for five minutes resist the craving to be an asshole.

“I’m sorry, Sam,” he says, and it’s actually easy, much easier than he thought all those years he avoided just this (because “I’m sorry, this is all my fault since I didn’t stop you from becoming a total fuck-up” is not really an apology anyone wants to hear).

Sam twitches again, shivers, twitches. It’s like his body has something to say about this as well and is preparing for a seizure.

“I’m not gonna let you do that to yourself again.” Dean speaks quickly, as if he could save Sam by finding the right words. “Can’t watch you suffer like that again, little brother. You’re fine now. You’re gonna be fine. You’re not somebody’s weapon.”

In response, Sam twitches again and then he doesn’t have a seizure, but he’s puking as if he hadn’t done that enough already, only just managing to lean forward and miss puking all over himself. He probably didn’t hear a word Dean said.

When he is done, he whispers, “This sucks,” and Dean almost smiles anyway.

 

-

 

Sam having to give up a conversation due to sickness does not mean Sam giving up the conversation altogether. He’s just waiting for the right moment to bring it up again, like an alligator waiting for a hapless zebra, and Dean isn’t sure he can give the same speech again in case his brother really did miss it the first time.

For now, Sam’s low-grade fever that never left him alone in the first place has gotten worse again and his cough has come back, closing his throat with violent hacking whenever he tries to speak, and isn’t Dean ever the lucky one. Jena spends more time with them now, and Dean sees her place her small hands on Sam’s forehead or the sides of his neck at least twice a day. She’s helping Sam heal as best she can, Dean knows, but he also knows that her powers are merely scratching the surface of all the shit that is destroying Sam’s body. Including hunger. Not much longer and the decision they have to face might not even be using Sam as a weapon or not, but simply if they are allowing him to starve.

Jena glares at Dean as if she were already anticipating the next fight they are going to have over this. Under her hands Sam is tossing in his sleep, going from still to restless from one moment to the next. His legs are kicking away the blankets and one of his hands hits the stony ground beside his “bed” so hard Dean winches in sympathy. He moves to wake his brother up, but Jena beats him to it when she slaps Sam’s face, harshly, and hisses “Wake up!”

Dean jumps in surprise, just before anger rises in him. But Sam doesn’t wake up. He just moves to bat the hand away and whimpers, “No. I won’t. No.”

“Shit,” Dean says.

Jena slaps Sam again and this time Dean thinks about helping her. But Sam still won’t wake. After a while he calms down and sinks back into deep, apparently peaceful sleep.

“Maybe it was just a nightmare,” Dean says hopefully after he tugged the blankets back around his brother.

Jena snorts. “How would that be better?”

“Are you kidding? It’s the fucking Devil trying to get him.” Maybe torturing him in his dreams, since asking nicely didn’t work. The thought makes Dean sick.

“And a nightmare based on memories of the Devil trying to get his consent would have been preferable how?” Jena waves his answer away before he can even open his mouth. “It doesn’t even matter. He said no. No reason to worry yet.”

“Your sympathy is touching as always,” Dean sneers.

“And how would sympathy help him? The only way to stop this is to get Lucy back where he came from.”

Another thought comes to Dean. “Do we have to move again? If Lucifer has found his way back into Sam’s dreams-”

“Lucy has been in his dreams all the time,” Jena interrupts him. “It’s not an indicator.”

“All the time?” Dean feels like crying. “But he didn’t…” He trails off.

“That it didn’t show and Sam didn’t tell us doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. And ill as he is, Sam has precious little defenses against it.”

“He wouldn’t be this ill if you had a better handle of your non-destructive powers.” It’s probably not the best idea to piss off the only one who can help at all, but Dean needs blame someone.

Jena merely grimaces. “I’m not exactly the angel of healing.”

“Who is, then?”

“Raphael. He’s not on our side.”

“No, I know. We met. And Cas told me about him. He’s basically Michael’s pet.” Dean remembers now: the furious angel with wings made of lightning, seething and impotent in a ring of holy fire. The dick who tended to turn his own vessels into human vegetables is supposed to be the great healer of Heaven? Dean is actually pretty convinced that he has happily helped to torture Sam to death whenever Michael managed to get him in his clutches. “He’s the only one who could heal Sam?”

“He’s the one with the best chance. There would be no guarantee. Lucifer used to laugh at him. Either way, he would never try. Don’t waste your time on it. There’s no plan there.”

Dean makes a non-committal sound and Jena rolls her eyes. “There’s only one way to save your brother and you know it.”

“We’re not having this discussion again.”

“We won’t be able to avoid it for much longer. Besides, you do remember it’s not your decision, right?”

It is, because Big Brothers have a right to veto. Before Dean can inform the angel of that, Cas comes in. He looks from one to the other, then at Sam, and remains standing near the opening of the cave. There’s snow in his hair. “I’m done. We’re almost good to go.”

“Go?” Dean’s stomach sinks. “Go where?”

“We’re leaving tomorrow,” Jena kindly informs him. “Pretty Boy took care of the horses and the carriage.”

“You said Lucifer’s influence was no indicator for him finding us.”

“It isn’t. Doesn’t mean it’s not time to move on. We’ve been here almost too long. They are looking for us, remember? _Everyone_ is. The longer we stay anywhere, the sooner they’ll find us. This place is shielded but we’re leaving traces all over the area. They could probably see them from space.”

“Sam’s not-”

“Sam can sleep on the carriage. That’s why we have it. Actually, I’ve chosen the longer route to the mountains just for him, like the good mom I am.”

There’s no way Dean could be okay with this, but he’s beginning to accept that being on the run comes with disadvantages. At least he’s feeling better himself, his own fever and lingering weakness from the infection mostly gone. Only an ugly scar still remains of the bite, but if it stays this cold, no one will see his naked arms ever again, anyway.

He’s still tired and exhausted all the time, but judging by the way Cas looks, he’s probably not the only one. Now Dean’s stronger he can help more – and it’ll be nice to feel a little less useless, though it’s been kind of nice when his only job was to make sure Sammy didn’t get cold.

At the very least there will be no more falling off carriages.

But the mountains worry him. He doesn’t like the sound of that. “How much rest can he probably get while on the run? You don’t really think he’s gonna be up to climbing any mountains, do you?”

“He’ll have to be. We can’t stay in this area.” That’s Cas speaking. He takes one of the water bottles over to Sam and kneels beside him, gently coaxing him half-awake and lifting his head so he can take a few sips. Dean watches with something like consternation. He knows how fucking important it is to keep Sam hydrated, especially if he’s sweating like this, but how is it fair that Dean gets the unstoppable nightmares and the Satan-visits, and Cas gets the half-awake “Oh Cas, you are so awesome for not letting me die of thirst, thank you so much”-smile that isn’t actually there but Dean is sure it would be if Sam was that little bit more awake.

As it is, Sam manages a few sips and is asleep by the time his head hits the make-shift pillow made of rolled-up clothes. And Dean looks around their cave the way he used to look around motel rooms and makes a list in his head of all the things he needs to pack.

Ironically enough, compared to their glory days, it hasn’t gotten much less.

 

-

 

It’s snowing when they make their way down the dried river bed, and this time the snow doesn’t melt the moment it touches the ground. Dean thinks with dread about the future. If it gets much colder, Lucifer won’t have to put any effort into finding them. He’ll just have to wait patiently until Sam’s soul comes to him when he freezes to death.

Or starves. Jena has been bringing food, but most of it was canned of inexplicable origin. Little fresh meat. Dean hopes that this is because she thought it would be nice to have a change in their diet rather than because they are running out of animals to kill.

Although the issue with Sam and starvation, admittedly, lies somewhere else.

The snow makes the natural path slippery and Dean falls onto his ass more than once on the steeper parts. He’s hardly setting a good example for his little brother who follows more slowly, depending on him and Cas to help him down the more difficult parts. Jena, as always, is entirely useless. When they make it down, she’s sitting on the carriage, eating an apple and watching them struggle to keep their balance.

Awesome mom his ass.

The horses look exactly the same as they did when their little group arrived at the cave a few days ago. Dean hasn’t seen them since that day and was half-convinced that they had been eaten by something in the meantime. Possibly by him and Cas. There had been that little bit of fresh meat, after all.

Sam, of course, has eaten nothing. Dean likes to tell himself that he’s doing better, overall, but the fact that he can close his hand completely around his once strong brother’s upper arms makes it hard to feel optimistic.

Just the few minutes’ walk down the rocks exhausted Sam completely. Hardly able to stand in the first place, he’s trembling by the time they make it to flat ground. Yet, Dean’s brother stubbornly refuses to let anyone carry him. Dean wants to scream at him, tell him he’s a moron and that he should save every little bit of strength he has, but he understands about control and why Sam needs to feel like he has even a little of it.

That doesn’t mean he has to like the way his brother is panting for air when they reach the carriage, or the fact that he can’t make it up there without quite a lot of help.

“We won’t have any long breaks, so if you’re tired, you crash with Sammy,” Jena says from up on her horse as Dean and Cas climb onto the bench of the wagon. Her hand is tugging the animal’s mane and it shakes its head unwillingly as Dean glares at her, unhappy about her use of the nickname that is reserved only for him. He looks down at Sam, but Sam doesn’t seem to care. He’s leaning heavily against their bags and staring at nothing, his face pale. Every now and then he twitches, his eyes darting back and forth as if following something only he can see. He probably has other problems than someone not Dean calling him by his childhood name.

In the end, when they start moving, Dean is almost glad to be leaving. Anything that puts distance between them and their pursuers is good.

 

-

 

Their departure may take them away from any traces they left for Lucifer, Michael and whoever else to find, but it doesn’t do so very quickly. As before, they make their way along the line of mountains at a pretty relaxed pace, and more than once Dean wants to grab the reins and make the horses go faster. He knows, of course, that it’s due to the carriage and the uneven ground that they can’t go faster, but that doesn’t help with the feeling that at any moment he’s going to see the shadow of giant wings on the cover of clouds above them.

The snow doesn’t help. It keeps falling – not strongly, but steadily, and Dean already sees them get stuck and having to make their way on foot over to whatever mountain exactly it is Jena thinks it would be a good idea to cross.

They left early in the morning, and around midday they stop near a small river to let the horses drink and rest and refill their own bottles. At least the river isn’t frozen yet. It’s moving too fast to be affected by temperatures higher than Seriously Below Freezing, but Dean begins to worry about the water in their bottles.

Sam doesn’t move much. He stays huddled against the bags and furs, knees drawn to this chest, his eyes bloodshot and glassy. Little clouds of condensed breath are dancing in front of his face. Dean climbs up to make him drink a little, then huddles beside him and closes his eyes. He’s not all that tired, but his body melts into the soft furs and against his brother’s unhealthy warmth and before he realizes it, he’s drifted off.

When a rough shove against his leg wakes him, not more than ten minutes can have passed. Dean is disoriented for a few seconds, but surprisingly well rested. A life consisting of night-time hunts and research marathons has taught him the value of short nabs.

It’s Cas who woke him. “We’re leaving,” he says, and when Dean looks around, he sees Jena wrap something inside a cloth that’s probably leftovers of the food they ate without him. He hurries over, snatches the bundle and keeps it with him when climbs back onto the bench. Jena smirks but doesn’t say anything as Dean inspects the contents and finds dried fruit, dried meat and what’s left of the potatoes Cas dug up two days ago, cooked over the fire for better edibility. Though Dean isn’t entirely sure it’s really potatoes, what with them being available in winter and all. But then, he doesn’t even know what month it is. Might be August.

He’d love to feed one of the soft things to his brother, but Sam looks like he’s going to puke even without him contributing to it.

So he just waits for Cas to come join him and take the reins, but Cas never shows. Instead the wagon creaks with movement in the back and Dean turns around to see his old friend crawl up to Sam. He’s holding a rolled up fur in his hands, stripes hanging off the corners. Dean can imagine what it’s for, but he’s never seen it before, so Cas probably created it while he was nabbing.

When he notices Dean looking, Cas tilts his head in something that’s maybe supposed to look apologetic. “I’m tired,” he informs Dean. “Take over for a while.”

He does look tired, as Dean notices now he’s actually paying attention. In fact, Cas looks like he hasn’t slept in days. Probably hasn’t, too – Cas doesn’t need quite as much sleep as the average human, and while he lay down with them most nights, he was always already awake when Sam woke Dean with his trashing nightmares, so maybe he only snuggled up to them to keep Sam as warm as possible between them.

Sam’s so fragile now that Dean, not exactly honing his football player muscles anymore either, is always a little scared that he’ll crush him in his sleep. (Like when he was a baby, this tiny little thing that mom left behind for Dean to watch over when she left them.)

In the light of that, it would probably better if Sammy stayed curled up and sitting upright, making himself as compact as possible, but it has to be hell on his joints. So Dean wishes he would stretch, even if that means losing warmth, because seriously, Sammy, there are enough blankets to cover half the planet with.

And yet, Dean feels irrationally pissed off when Cas coaxes his brother into a lying position with soft words and gentle but firm touches. And just in a second he’s going to stretch out beside him, Dean just knows. Which makes sense because of warmth and the lack of any other space to lie down, but it still pisses Dean off.

Worst is how easily Sam leans into those touches and lets himself be guided.

When Sam’s lying flat, Cas ties the fur to the edges of the carriage, creating a small roof to protect them from the snow that’s been steadily getting worse. About time, really, but Dean still wants to stop him when he pulls it down, covering both Cas and Sam from sight. Damn, why couldn’t Gabriel have pulled a damn plane wagon out of his ass?

There’s movement beneath the cover and then the part of the blankets still visible fills out as Cas stretches his legs out alongside Sam’s. Dean glares at the bulge as if he could somehow make it disappear until Jena rides over to him and punches his arm. “We were supposed to be going somewhere, hero,” she reminds him. “The two of them will still be there if you turn around and concentrate on getting this horse to move it’s impressive ass. And they’re still be cuddling.”

That’s exactly what worries Dean, and judging by her malicious grin she’s well aware of it. “Sure you’re not just jealous? Sorry, dude, but I’m not going to warm those feet of yours.”

Jena, despite the snow, is still barefoot. By all rights her feet should be blue and bleeding from countless cuts. Naturally, they’re not. She just grins more.

“Dean, dear, I am a Norse God as a second career. The Vikings called me Loki. I basically invented the cold, just to have an excuse to show them how to keep warm.”

Dean really doesn’t want to think about that. “Loki, huh? That makes me worry what you might have been thinking when you complimented this horse’s ass.” He pulls the reins a little and the horse moves even though Dean doesn’t really know what he’s doing. Maybe it’s trying to get away from Jena’s lecherous grin.

For the first time he’s really, really glad Gabriel doesn’t have a dick in this incarnation.

“One does have a reputation to upkeep,” the angel just says. Dean shudders.

So does the horse.

 

-

 

Surprisingly enough, they make it to their next stop without Jena trying to hump anything. Although, didn’t Dean read something once about how riding is basically a form of sexual stimulation for girls? There must be a reason why she’s opted to ride the horse instead of the wagon all this time.

Dean really doesn’t like the course his thoughts are taking. (Well, he could always distract himself by thinking about Cas and Sam under that cover behind him…)

“You look like someone who needs to get laid.” Jena’s definitely enjoying this far too much. She must get bored, stuck without being allowed to use her powers much and riding a horse to substitute for sex, so she torments the human a bit. Yeah, Dean gets it, thank you very much.

“Please, don’t,” he groans. “You’re really not my type.” She actually isn’t, and wouldn’t be even if she wasn’t Gabriel. Even though she’s the only female being Dean’s seen in ages and there’s been moments when he thought that getting laid would be really nice, Jena doesn’t even register on his radar. There’s the fact that she looks too young for his tastes, is too skinny, and that he used to know her when she was a guy and liked to kill him a lot.

“Too bad. You’re mine.”

“Since when are you into men?” Might be a stupid question, but Dean imagines that if he grew a pair of boobs he’d become an out and proud lesbian rather than show any interest in dick.

Jena rolls her eyes, “Since I don’t discriminate, dumbass. Which I never did. I would have taken you when I wore the janitor. Sammy too. Nice pair of asses, the two of you. One does learn to appreciate art.”

It’s the perfect way to void all the improvement of Dean’s mood the mindless babbling might have brought. The words, along his brother’s nickname, nearly make him jump over to tear her off her horse and punch her into the ground. Jena seems to notice that mentioning Sam in the context of sex has been a mistake and hurries to change the topic. To a certain extent of change. “I’ve had sex in ways your stuck up boundaries won’t ever be able to imagine. Now the Romans, they knew how to make love. Because I taught them.”

“I hear one of your sons was a wolf,” Dean snaps, still feeling aggressive and suddenly scared that Sam might have woken up just in time to hear an archangel talk about wanting to fuck him.

Jena is completely unfazed. “And another was a giant snake. You should have seen their moms.”

By now, Dean is pretty damn convinced Gabriel is pulling his leg. He just growls in response, sliding off the bench when the wagon finally comes to a stop. His ass is hurting from all the sitting on the hard wood and in context that’s really not something he appreciates. He considers making a pillow to sit on out of his folded shirt or the blanket he has wrapped around his shoulders, but it’s cold and he’s not getting an awful lot of movement up there, so he’d rather not lose any of his covers.

His fingers are numb with cold and his face feels kind of frozen. Maybe he should ask Cas to make him one of those silly hats with ears the next time he kills something.

But then, after this break it’ll be Cas’ turn to freeze his ass off up there while Dean will curl up with this furnace that is his little brother and sleep the wariness out of his body. He walks around the carriage, looks under the covers and can just about make out the two of them, curled up facing each other. Damn, their legs are probably entwined beneath the blankets. Dean pulls a grimace and turns back to Jena. “We’re gonna stay here for a few hours?” They’re near a river again, no surprise there, but they’re also on their way through a small forest on a road that is still mostly intact. The leaves are sheltering them from the snow, the soft wind and the prying eyes of anything looking for them.

Of course, they also keep their tracks from being covered by fresh snow, because the earth isn’t frozen through yet, is still preserving the imprint of the wheels and the hooves. And the state of the road worries Dean. For it to not be completely overgrown, someone has to maintain it, and that means people living here, and that means people who can find them and rattle them out to the angels.

“Just until the sun comes up.” Dean can tell from Jena’s expression that she would prefer not to stop at all, but they’ve already travelled well into the night and between the trees, there is no weak glow of the snow reflecting the meager glimmer that always lingers between the ground and the clouds. It’s simply too dark to move on, even though he suspects her night vision to be better than his.

The sun’s not coming up for another three or four hours. Despite the weather, the days have been notably getting longer since they left their shelter in the non-existent house. Two hundred years ago, they would be moving towards summer.

So no potato season yet. At least that’s settled, then.

Dean shivers. He busies himself freeing the horse of the belts and ropes keeping it before the carriage and lets it wander off to look for grass between the trees, nibble on a few leaves with its friend and then hopefully lie down so Dean can lean against it and suck in some warmth.

He and Jena share a quiet dinner that is spared any kind of sex talk, thank God. Eventually, Dean asks, “How cold do you think it’s going to get?”

“It depends,” is the vague reply. “This might be it, at least for the next fifty years. But I wouldn’t count on it. It could soon be very, very cold.”

“But the weather barely ever changes at all. It should take years for the temperatures to drop like this.”

“Exactly. This has been happening a little too fast for my taste. But I’m not sure. It could still be natural.”

Suddenly, Dean understands. His insides turn to ice. “You think this is Lucifer’s doing? He’s trying to kill Sam by making everyone freeze to death?”

“Michael, more likely. But yeah, it could be. I don’t know, but I certainly wouldn’t put it beyond him. It would be the sensible thing to do, from his point of view. I’m just not sure the planet would tolerate such a change anymore. We are, in the end, bound to it in a way. There are limits.”

Dean doesn’t reply to that in any way. For the first time he really becomes aware of just how hopeless their battle is against beings that have the whole damn planet on their side.

Suddenly without appetite, Dean packs his dinner away, thinks about trying to feed the leftovers to Sam and is overcome by another wave of hopelessness. Be it hunger, withdrawal or cold, Sam is going to die, and they won’t be able to get him back another time.

“You’re a fucking archangel,” he says, his voice full of anger.

Jena raises an eyebrow. “I can’t make it summer, if that’s what you’re after.”

“I didn’t think you could. After all, there’s a pretty impressive list of things you can’t do.” Including keeping Sam alive.

Jena glares at him, then, unexpectedly, she laughs. It sounds only slightly fake. “I can kill you, for instance.”

“Part of the point,” Dean says entirely unimpressed. “You can kill basically anyone. Of all of us you have the best chances for survival. In fact, I’d go so far as to say you have _excellent_ chances for survival, given your natural drive to stay alive.”

“And yet here I am,” Jena reminds him, but she seems mildly interested. “You sound like you’re going somewhere with this.”

“You could kill Sam.”

“Dean, sweetheart, a toothless rabbit could kill Sam.”

“That’s kind of the point. It’s nearly hopeless to keep him alive so we need to,” Dean swallows, “need to consider how to keep him safe anyway.”

“Ah.” Jena nods slowly. “I can see where this is going.”

“You can do what Cas did,” Dean confirms. “Take Sam’s soul and protect it from your psychopathic brothers.”

“Not the worst idea ever,” Jena agrees. “Unfortunately, it’s impossible.”

“What? How so?”

“Well, Lucy’s an overcautious son of a bitch. He didn’t think anyone else would ever again lay hands on his dear Sammy, and yet first thing after he took him from Cas, he marked the soul in a way that makes it impossible to ever carry it like that again.”

Dean feels hopelessness crash down on him. “How can you be so sure? He told you?”

“No, we checked as soon as we made it out of Lucy’s hiding place, when it looked like Sam would die right under our hands any second.”

Once again Dean thinks he might be sick. “’We’?”

“Cas and I, of course. We knew we couldn’t take this way out even before you woke up.”

“Wait. Does that mean you wanted to kill my brother while I was asleep?”

“Well, obviously.” Jena says it as if it was, indeed, obvious. “We could hardly wait until you felt up to joining us, could we? Besides, you would have been overly dramatic about it.”

“Dramatic!” Dean jumps us, his hands balled to fists, but Jena remains unimpressed, even though she seems to sober up a little bit.

“Think about it, Dean. For Sam it would have been for the best – or why else did you suggest it just now?”

But Dean’s not thinking about that, he’s thinking about waking up with his memories intact and finding only his brother’s dead body waiting for him. No chance to talk to him ever again, or to apologize (since he’s made such a great job of that so far).

A creaking sound behind him makes him jump and turn around. Something moves under the covers on the wagon and he becomes acutely aware that they are having this conversation within earshot of his brother.

Jena raises her eyebrows at him, silently urging Dean to go on, but he doesn’t actually have anything more to say about this, because he knows she’s right and he hates himself for knowing it.

If they had waited for him to wake up and killed Sam afterwards, what good would that have done in the end? It might have satisfied Dean’s selfish desire to hold his brother’s warm body one more time and says he’s sorry, but Sam still wouldn’t even have known his brother was back with them.

Jena and Cas are the wrong people to direct his anger at. Intellectually he knows that. But somewhere deep inside him the less fucked-up boy still exists, the boy who is convinced that no-one is allowed to make any decisions about his little brother’s life but him.

Not even Sam. Which perhaps is a summarization of all Dean has done wrong.

Unable and unwilling to continue the conversation, he makes his way over to the horses that have settled on the ground by now and leans against on one of the warm backs, preferring the company of the dozing animals over anything that could talk back at him.

 

-

 

When the sky starts to brighten, Jena starts to get busy. She collects their stuff, whistles once and the horses actually jump up and wander over to her. Dean has to jump out of the way and glares at her, even as he starts preparing the animals for the next part of the road. He dozed a little himself, unwillingly but unable to stay awake any longer. It did nothing but freeze his joints from the lack of movement.

His fingers are num; the only thing not cold in him is the anger he still feels at himself and everyone else.

They are nearly done when Cas shows signs of life. He must have slept for more than ten hours and he looks much better for it as he pulls away the fur stretched over him and Sam. Instead of grabbing a bite to eat and getting his ass onto the bench taking the reins, he pulls out a water bottle he apparently kept under the covers with them to keep it from becoming too cold and gently shakes Sam halfway to wakefulness to prop him up and make him drink a little, being all fucking careful and soft, like treating to a baby. Then he settles Sam back onto the blankets and comes crawling down, stretching his limps like they had all the fucking time in the world.

He’s also standing in the way. Dean shoves him aside none too gently and with a glare but without a word, earning a confused frown in response he would love to punch out of Cas’ stupid face.

His old friend is, of course, used to Dean not being entirely happy with him, but obviously he has no idea what he did wrong this time. Looks like he really did sleep all through the conversation.

Dean doesn’t offer an explanation. He carefully crawls up the wagon, pulls over the roof even though they don’t need it at the moment and snuggles against his brother under the cover. He imagines his icy body cooling Sam’s fever as Sam’s heat drives the cold out of Dean’s bones. Like something that belongs.

He imagines waking up with the memories of all the ways he wronged his brother in his mind and only a cold dead body to reunite with.

Sam turns towards him in his sleeps and breathes against his chest.

 

-

 

Even though Dean is tired beyond belief, it takes a long time before the rough movements of the wagon on the uneven ground lulls him to sleep. When he opens his eyes it’s to Sam stirring softly against him and still tired, the exhaustion sitting deep in his bones and trying to drag him back under.

Washed out daylight greets him when he blinks his eyes open, the dirty orange of the sky reflected by the snow and making the whole world look like a cloud of chemical gas.

There are voices. Cas and Jena talking, but not to each other. Jena says something and is answered by a voice Dean doesn’t know.

“Pretty close, actually,” the voice says.

“How many?” Cas asks.

“Oh, there’s room for some more, if that’s what you want to know. It’s just the two of you?”

Sam moves, quite awake, and his fingers scrape along the underside of the fur above them, as if desperate to see what’s going on out there, so Dean shoves the roof aside before his brother can panic. Sam at once sits up, pulling himself upright on the side of the wagon and Dean helps here, too, even as he begins to understand that it might be a better idea to keep his brother’s presence hidden.

The sour look Jena throws them when they emerge tells Dean that she thought along the same lines. “It was going to be,” she says drily. “But then we got company.”

Beside Dean, Sam blinks in the weak light, an expression on his face Dean can’t read. Disbelieving astonishment might come close; for a moment he thinks Sam recognizes the three strangers standing beside Jena’s horse, but then he remembers that anyone Sam might have known is long since gone.

At least it doesn’t seem to be a “Oh shit, these are demons” expression, but then, Dean doesn’t even know if those instincts still work with the blood (mostly) out of Sam’s system.

He kind of assumes that Jena would know, though, even if Cas didn’t.

The three random strangers, two men and a woman, look normal enough to Dean. They are wearing clothes made of animal skins and fur, which probably means there’s no department store around that offered enough clothes to be raided for generations, which doesn’t exactly come as a surprise. Despite the cold, their faces are sweaty, as if they’ve been doing hard labor. After a moment Dean sees a small wagon full of wood they’ve apparently been dragging behind them, and if Dean’s not mistaken, at least one of them eyes theirs horses with obvious greed. Instinctively, he tightens his hold around Sam’s shoulders to pull him aside should these be the kind of people capable of Spontaneous Murder for Horses.

Though he’d like to see them try to get past the angels.

The men are wearing quite impressive beards that obscure half their faces, but their eyes look young, not older than Sam. The woman can’t be much older than Gabriel’s vessel has been by the time the archangel took over, however long ago that might have been.

All of them are staring at Dean and Sam as they peek over the side of the wagon, probably all ruffled (Sam certainly is) and looking like little kids disturbed during a nap. More precisely, they are staring at Sam, and that gets all of Dean’s big brother instincts in uproar.

“What’s wrong with him?” the woman asks, taking in Sam’s pale, thin face and bloodshot eyes. “Is he sick?” She sounds nervous, and the guys look nervous, and Dean understands.

“He’s had an accident,” he hurries to say. “Bad infection. He’s recovering, though.”

His words put them at ease some but he can see that they remain tenser than they have been before the brothers made their appearance. “So, why are you out here all on your own?” one of the men wants to know. “You’re not from the area, I’d know you.” Besides that, he can probably hear it from the way they speak. All of the strangers talk in a drawl that sounds vaguely Georgian to Dean, though he’s pretty sure that this is not, in fact, Georgia.

“Our village had to be given up when the temperature dropped. There wasn’t enough food, so some of us left, hoping to find a better place in the south. But most of us didn’t make it over the mountains.” Cas speaks smoothly, as if he didn’t realize that these people were scared they’d been chased out of their village because Sam had a catching illness, or that the epidemic had simply wiped out everyone else.

They calm down even more after that, though they stay on their guard, as everyone has learned to do who survived this long in a world this generally evil.  They relax enough, however, to revel that their village isn’t far from here, that there used to be more villages around but most have died out in recent decades and that they wouldn’t be devastated if these four travelers decided to settled down and bring some fresh blood. Or at least stay a while and leave one of their horses in gratitude for the villagers’ hospitality.

Like that’s going to happen, but then, once they reach the mountains, they can’t keep the horses anyway. The idea of taking a few nights in a proper house and maybe some fresh food for the road from these people and in return allow one or two of them to accompany them to the mountains and take the horses back with them when Dean and the others have no longer need them comes suddenly and is very tempting. He doesn’t like the thought of just leaving the animals to fend for themselves anyway, after they served them so patiently.

And then there’s Sammy, who looks at these people as if they were the best things that ever happened to this planet.

“We could really do with a place to rest,” Jena answers to their invitation just that moment, and Dean is surprised. He thought she would want to avoid closer contact with others as much as possible, and almost wants to protest the decision just for that.

“How much further to your village?” Cas wants to know, and one of them gestures in the direction of a hill where Dean can only just make out the tops of a couple of bare trees. “Over there. If not for the hill, you could see it.”

“Awesome.” Jena gives them a happy grin that would fool Dean if he didn’t know her; but he does, and so it looks mostly creepy to him. Not even evil, as she tends to be, just creepy. “Lead the way! If you want, you can leave that wagon with us – my horse can pull it faster than you.”

The idea obviously excites them, no surprise there. What surprises Dean is Jena jumping off her horse and pulling some of their spare ropes out of her bag. “Just leave it to me,” she says and they stand back a little, watch her, watch Dean and Cas and especially Sam and then they go a few steps aside to a have a little discussion, too far away for Dean to make out much except that apparently one of them is convinced the town guard will shoot the newcomers on sight and that they can’t agree who will go and announce their coming. And how to politely take away all of their weapons, naturally. Well, they can try.

“Hey Sammy.” He gently punches his brother in the rips, so carefully Sam probably hardly even feels it. “How do you feel about getting a real bed again? I bet they have excellent straw for us to sleep on.”

Sam turns to look at him with something like a smile and tears in his eyes that are more than a little confusing. “Hey, what’s wrong?” Dean asks, concerned but not _too_ concerned, understanding that Sam is sick and emotional and has every right to be. “I know they are a little dirty, but I didn’t think they look terrible enough to make babies cry.”

Sam shakes his head and ignored the lame joke. “I just wasn’t sure there was anyone left.”

And Dean finally gets it. Since Sam came back, they have been running through empty wastelands without seeing a single human being. Sure, they mentioned the other people they met on their travels to him, but is it really surprising if Sam thought that in his absence everyone else died? That his struggles for all those years have been in vain?

Now he thinks about it, Sam was with Lucifer and his angels for a good while before Dean and the others pulled him out. Who knew what the bastards told him?

“Aw, Sammy,” he signs and gently ruffles his brother’s hair. “The world is full of people. Granted, most of them are assholes, but what else is new?”

It gets a weak smile out of his brother, who then turns his attention back to the three strangers who keep sneaking glances at him as if to make sure he doesn’t develop black bumps all over his body while they’re still deciding what to do.

The fact that they are willing to take the travelers back to their villages despite their lingering suspicions about Sam’s state tells Dean how badly they need fresh blood. He worries, though – about the reaction of the other villagers to someone so obviously sick. Their stay there is going to be tense, with Dean ready to attack anyone coming too close to his brother, and if the tenseness of Castiel’s shoulders is anything to go by, he’s ready to do the same.

As for Jena, when Dean looks over to her she’s just very calmly pulling the wooden bow from the back of her horse’s saddle, puts in an arrow and aims. Dean’s shocked call comes too late. The first man is hit in the back of the neck and dead before the others even understand what’s going on. Jena’s fingers fly to the next arrow and the woman falls, an arrow embed so deeply in her chest it nearly comes out of her back. Only the last man has a chance to react to the danger, but he barely manages to get his hand around the handle of the knife in his belt when a third arrow pierces his throat, killing him within seconds.

Worse than the gurgling sound that escapes his destroyed throat just before death is the strangled cry Sam makes once it registers what’s happening. Before Dean can even get over his shock, his brother has kicked off the blankets still covering him and crawled off the wagon, only to have his legs give out the moment they touch the ground. Immediately, he tries to get back to his feet and now Dean’s there, helping him up and holding him back as he struggles to get to Jena, tears of rage streaming down his face. His lips move, but words seem to escape him. Dean gets it, he does.

Jena watches him impassively. Cas hasn’t moved at all. He doesn’t even turn to see what they are doing.

“What the fuck have you done?” Dean spits the words his brother can’t form – or has no air for. Sam seems to be struggling for breath now and Dean begins to worry what this must be doing to him. It makes him even angrier with Jena.

“Taken out a potential threat,” Jena says coolly. “I thought you’d appreciate that. Or am I really the only one who saw the danger?”

Sam finally finds something to say, even though he nearly chokes on it. “They were just _humans_.”

“I know.” Jena shrugs. “So what? They would still have betrayed us. They, or someone from their village, knowingly or not. As soon as the first demon or angel came along, they would have known exactly where we were and were we are going.”

“So you killed them on principle? They didn’t even do anything wrong yet!” Dean still can’t quite believe it. Sam’s legs give out and he nearly falls but suddenly Cas is there, helping to keep him upright and hyperventilating between them.

“And you would have taken the risk? If I needed any more proof how much you need me, this would be it.” Jena’s still holding the bow. She has a Colt, Dean knows, but that would have been too loud, would have alerted the people in the village. Too much attention, even if they would have been gone by the time anyone arrived.

Those people wouldn’t even have recognized the sound of a gunshot for what it is, Dean thinks. “Last time I checked we were trying to save mankind, not wipe it out.”

“Most of all we’re trying to protect Sam, are we not? He’s the one thing everything depends on and we can’t take _any_ risk. Anything that can be done to keep danger away from him has to be done, and I don’t care if that insults your sensibilities. I don’t think you have any idea how _fragile_ your brother is.”

As if to prove her right, Sam doubles over and retches. Weak as he is, this was simply too much for him. Dean wishes he’d just slept through it all.

“As I see it, it’s your actions that didn’t exactly do him any good,” he snaps before helping Cas to lift Sam back onto the wagon once the retching has stopped.

How could things go from awesome downhill so fast?

While they take care of Sam, Jena continues to be unimpressed. She wanders over to the three bodies, pulling out the arrows, then rolling the corpses into bushes where they are less obvious with a few well-placed kicks. In the end she begins to place some of the logs from the small wagon the three were pulling along onto a free spot on their own wagon. “We shouldn’t let this go to waste,” she explains when she notices Dean staring. “It’s cold.”

 

-

 

Sam is still sobbing helplessly when they move on. He curls into a ball as much as his stiff and aching body allows him to and clenches his teeth against the angry sobs that try to escape him. Dean’s comforting hand he doesn’t seem to notice.

When Sam’s fever comes back with a vengeance not an hour after they moved on, leaving three corpses half-hidden in the bushes, Dean isn’t surprised. If there’s one thing his brother doesn’t need it’s any more emotional stress. It’s a long time before Sam falls asleep, and when he does, he’s twitchy and restless, shouting incomprehensible words every now and then.

It’s the only words spoken for a long time. They travel in tense silence, their speed still excruciatingly slow but a little faster than before, a little more rushed. It’s still a couple of days to the mountains and Dean is torn; wanting to go as fast a possible, yet wanting to postpone their arrival at their destination and the loss of the wagon to give his brother more time to rest.

He continues to travel on the back of the wagon, keeping one hand on Sam’s leg as he sits leaning against the sides. He’s not even cold anymore, feels strangely numb under all the anger. Sometimes he looks up to glare at Jena, but she acts like nothing happened. To her it probably doesn’t matter at all. She used to feed people to crocodiles, after all. This wasn’t even up to her standards.

 

-

 

Even though their speed didn’t feel all that much faster to Dean, the horses are trembling with exhaustion when they finally stop at dusk, coming to a halt beside a small lake. The water is covered in ice, but it’s so thin it takes absolutely no effort to break it. The horses drink greedily and Dean wonders if that’s good for them. It probably isn’t. Maybe Jena’s keeping them healthy the same way she’s keeping Sam from starving.

It once again reminds Dean of how fucking much they depend on this changeable, unpredictable asshole.

It falls to Cas to rub the horses dry after their stop, which is probably unfair after he had to drive all day. It’s not like they agreed on it. Dean simply didn’t offer to, and now he simply doesn’t move, just watches the other work, one hand slowly rubbing Sammy’s back. Cas doesn’t complain, doesn’t even glare at him. Maybe he thinks he owes him something.

Well, maybe he damn well does. Dean can’t forget how tense he was all the time while Jena spoke to the strangers. Maybe he knew, or at least suspected what she was about to do and let it happen.

Even though it’s not snowing anymore, Dean pulls the makeshift roof back over Sam’s head after a while to protect him from the cold. There are trees around them, enough for them to dare make a small fire. Dean looks at it from a distance, the warmth it promises tempting but not so much he’d leave Sam for it, or bear the presence of the two angels who are talking quietly in their damn language anyone but Dean seems to understand.

When Cas comes over to bring him a cup of steaming hot water, he accepts, though. The heat feels wonderful against his icy hands as he holds it, and when he smells the stream, it gets even better as Dean realizes that it’s not just hot water but tea, some of the natural stuff Cas sometimes makes. He didn’t think they had any left.

It still tastes strange, like earth and pine cones, but it’s better than nothing, and it warms him from the inside. Dean drinks a few sips, then wakes Sam just enough to make him drink, too. Sam accepts the rest of it, then curls up again and huddles even deeper into his blankets. His near-skeletal frame is wrecked by shivers from the fever and the cold. After a while he starts coughing, harsh and breathless, in a way he hasn’t in a while – not this badly. There goes Dean’s delusion that his lungs might finally be getting better, no matter what Cas and Jena told him about his illness.

He sighs wearily. Unless Sam starts coughing blood, there’s nothing he can do, and if Sam does cough blood, he can’t do anything but wipe it off his face.

Cas doesn’t say anything. He sticks around, though, sits at the end of the carriage with his feet dangling towards the ground, and listens to Dean’s brother chocking on his own lungs.

Eventually, Sam stops, and after a while he’s so still Dean is certain that he’s fallen back asleep. (Or died.)

“There would have been a better way,” he says quietly.

Cas shakes his head, barely perceptible as if he isn’t quite convinced this is the movement he should make. (He shouldn’t.) “None that would have been safe enough. We couldn’t avoid running into those people. Given the circumstances, this was the only possible course of action.”

“So that’s how you kept Sammy alive all those years?” Dean asks bitterly. “By randomly killing people?”

This time, Cas headshake is clearer. “Of course I didn’t. But things were different then. Easier.”

“Easier,” Dean echoes. “Yeah, because what you told me about it sounds just like a walk in the park.”

“Sam’s state was less critical,” Cas elaborates. “He died, but back then, his death was mostly an inconvenience. Now we can’t let it happen under any circumstances. I thought you understood that.”

Dean isn’t sure he wants to have this conversation with a man who calls Sam dying “inconvenient” without blinking. “Do you really believe that or are you just trying to justify murder here? Don’t forget who she is. She probably killed those people because she has a certain quota of murder to commit in order to keep up her ego.”

Cas looks at him blankly and Dean wishes it was easier to read him. “Does it matter?”

“It’ll matter to Sam.”

This time Cas looks away. “Sam is important,” he says regretfully. “His opinions are not.”


	14. Chapter 14

Sam’s fever breaks later that night and he wakes up before dawn, disoriented and miserable. His hands are working the edge of a blanket as if he is trying to tear it apart and he refuses to talk or even look at them. Probably feels like running away, Dean thinks – like he did when he was a teenager and stormed out after a fight with dad, doors slamming behind him. But that hasn’t been Sam for a long time. In recent years – the recent years that Dean remembers, long ago – when everything was falling apart around him, he would confront his conflicts with a grim determination that scared Dean sometimes and more than once drove _him_ out of the door rather than dealing with their issues.

Whether Sam wants to yell or to run because can’t stand their presence doesn’t even matter right now because he can’t do either. Ironically, his silent anger makes it clear to Dean that Cas and Jean were right in one regard:  Sam has no way of defending himself against _anything_ and depends on them to keep him safe. Even if Dean doesn’t always like the methods. (He stubbornly ignores the little voice that reminds him just what they would have to do to make Sam less fragile.)

Just before dawn, Sam starts to crawl off the wagon. His legs won’t carry him but once again Dean’s there to catch him and support his weight as Sam makes his way deeper into the trees. He’s shivering and shaking and Dean grabs one of the blankets, just in case this is going to take longer. Jena follows them with her eyes but neither she nor Cas come with them or try to hold them back.

Once Sam feels he’s far enough away from their camp to have some privacy, he relieves himself against a tree, much to Dean’s secret relief because Hell, that was a long time coming. Afterwards they wander a little further and Dean wraps the blanket about his brother’s shoulders since Sam doesn’t seem inclined to return just yet.

“Why did he do that?” Sam finally asks, whispers, through the white clouds of condensed breath in front of his face. Dean needs a second to get that he’s talking about Jena – just like Cas, Sam tends to mix the pronouns when it comes to the archangel.

“He thought they were leading us into a trap,” Dean tries lamely, but can see at once that Sam sees right through the lie. He probably knew already, never missing a chance to feel bad about the actions of someone else.

“It’s my fault,” he whispers. “If I hadn’t been there, they wouldn’t-”

“If not for you, they wouldn’t even have gotten that old, or been born at all,” Dean interrupts him. “Hell, Sammy. Nothing is your fault. It was all Jena, because she’s unpredictable and unreliable and selfish. She’d have killed them just out of boredom. You know what Gabriel told me? Once he turned his back on Heaven, he became a frigging Norse God by the name of Loki. Don’t know if that means anything to you, but the guy doesn’t have a good reputation, believe me. It’s just bad luck that among all the archangels out there, we have to be stuck with _him_ as a guide.”

“As opposed to Michael?” Sam mutters, then flinches as if he’s afraid of hurting Dean’s feelings. Little bitch. Dean simultaneously wants to shake and hug him. Instead he just sighs. “Yeah, I guess the alternatives aren’t all that awesome either.”

Sam shakes his head like he wants to say something but doesn’t have the strength for it. They really shouldn’t be out here. Emotional crisis or not, Sam shouldn’t move around in these arctic temperatures – or at all, for that matter. “Let’s go back.” Dean gently nudges his brother who doesn’t move. “I know Gabriel isn’t good company, but that’s exactly why we have to. For one, Loki might be a Norse god and into this kind of temperature, but I’m kind if freezing my ass off here, and besides, he’s into animals and I’m kind of worried what he’ll do with the horses while no one’s watching.”

“I think you’re confusing that with Zeus.”

The quiet acknowledgement of Dean’s attempt at humor takes him by surprise. A second later Dean’s grins and ruffles his brother’s hair. “Just remember, kiddo, not everything is the world is about you, hard as that may be to believe. What happened had nothing to do with you. Gabe is an asshole who murders people for fun – remember when he killed me, like, fifty-thousand times just for his entertainment? He doesn’t need motivation for anything he does.” And great, now he’s starting with the pronouns as well.

“That was all about me.”

Sam’s voice is so quiet Dean barely hears it, but he does, and it freezes him. “Why do you think that?”

“Because he told me.”

“What? When?” That bitch, Dean is going to kill her – going on and on about how fragile Sam is and then dropping shit like this on him.

“Just before he brought you back.”

But it was Michael who brought Dean back, or rather, let him go. Dean nearly says it when something clicks in his brain and he gets it. “You mean you knew that _all this time_?”

Sam nods miserably. “He wanted to make me understand that I had to let you go when your deal was due.” And Dean nearly laughs then. He doesn’t even ask why Sam never told him because he gets that, he does. Instead he pulls his brother close with something tight sitting in his chest and still doesn’t know how to feel happy about the fact that this is a lesson that Sam has never been able to learn.

 

-

 

Cas and Jena have prepared the horses and are ready to leave when the brothers get back. Jena glares at them but doesn’t say anything, which saves Dean’s fist from breaking any bones against her face. Sam still doesn’t look at any of them. He climbs back onto the carriage with Dean’s help and lets Dean wrap him in anything that might make him a little warmer but doesn’t lie down again. He leans against the bags, shares his blankets with his brother, and together they watch the road they leave behind, the traces in the snow. If it doesn’t start snowing again soon, killing the three nameless people will have been entirely in vain because anyone looking for them will only have to follows their tracks. If it does snow again, the snow will soon be too high for the wagon to get through.

It’s a lose/lose situation.

 

-

 

Over the course of the day, Sam sinks more and more heavily against his brother, falling asleep again and again, only to wake up groggy and aching but too weak and numb to get more comfortable. His fever doesn’t return and his cough stays mild and inconsistent, but he’s still weak, of course. Dean doesn’t worry about it too much. Sam’s bones are poking him even through layers of cloth and wool and yet it takes ages until Dean remembers what else is wrong with him.

His brother is slowly starving. Yeah, things like that are always easy to forget.

The new wave of desperation barely registers among everything else. Dean runs a hand through Sam’s raggedly cut hair and sighs.

 

-

 

When Sam’s awake, he wants to do stuff. It doesn’t even seem to be anything in particular – he just wants to do something other than lying around. Dean understands that, and he’s glad, even though it makes his brother cranky and wears him out. At least it means that Sam has recovered some of his energy and might not actually be two breaths away from kicking the bucket.

He wrings his hands a lot as if he were nervous, though, and when he notices he’s doing it and notices that Dean notices, he tries to stop and digs his fingers into the blankets instead, or grabs the edge of the carriage so hard Dean wants to tell him to stop before he gets splinters under his skin and dies of blood poisoning. Fucking fragile baby brother.

Cas looks over his shoulder every now and then, watching Sam fidget with an unreadable expression on his face. He never says anything, and neither does Jena, though Jena is riding ahead and doesn’t really care about anything that goes on behind her anyway. Probably looking for something new to kill, Dean thinks. And this is the angel that promised to take care of Sammy’s soul.

At some point, Dean climbs onto the bench to take over the reins, if only so he can claim he did his share of that and lie with Sammy when things get bad again. Cas doesn’t join Sam but sits beside Dean, leaving his friend alone. Behind them, Sam starts to frantically rummage through their packs, but when Dean asks what he’s looking for, he only shakes his head. Shortly after that he scrambles off the carriage and naturally falls to the ground in a graceless heap behind it.

They have already moved a few yards away from him by the time it registers what happened. They can’t move quickly on this ground, fortunately, but the ground is hard and the layer of snow is thin here. By the time they stopped, jumped off the wagon and ran back to him, Sam has pulled himself up and is staggering around on shaking legs. His palms are bleeding, of course they fucking are.

“What’s wrong?” Dean asks, reaching for his brother but being shaken off with an unwilling gesture. “Are you feeling sick? You could have fucking said something!”

But Sam shakes his head. “I just need to stretch my legs. Leave me alone.”

Dean can’t believe what he just heard. “You’ve got to be kidding me. You just jumped off the fucking wagon!”

“I felt like it.” Like he’s a fucking child. Dean could strangle him. They don’t have time for this bullshit.

“What are you, five? It’s hard enough to keep your ass alive without you contributing to the difficulties! Whatever made you think this was a good idea?” He moves to feel Sam’s forehead, see if maybe he’s delirious with fever, because that’s the only explanation he can come up with. Once again Sam evades his touch with a stubborn expression on his face. He doesn’t look delirious, though, and Dean groans in frustration. “You can hardly even walk, dumbass! Sometimes I don’t get why everyone thinks you’re the smart one in the family.”

“Neither do I,” Sam admits angrily. “I’ve been known to misjudge things quite fatally, after all.” And the way he looks at Dean makes clear that he’s not talking about trusting Ruby this time.

He’s been so calm and trusting around Dean lately, as if he had forgotten, but then, he’s been too sick to think straight for a long time. Dean doesn’t want to, not before Cas, but he can’t stop himself from glaring right back at Sam and asking in unjustified defiance, “Like what?”

“Like thinking that you would be able to pull your head out of your own ass long enough to trust me even a little!” Sam yells.

“Sam,” Cas snaps, his voice sharp. He reaches for Sam but this time it’s Dean who slaps his hand away.

“Do go on,” he says tightly.

Sam glares, tears brimming in his eyes. “I should never have trusted you to not use my mistakes as an excuse to give up! I thought you’d still love me enough to at least wait until I fucked up instead of assuming I would and never giving me a chance. Should have fucking known you would never even try because trying is fucking _hard_!”

Even though Dean expected this for a damn long time and knows he deserves all this and more, the words still feel like a punch to the face. He stands still and bears it, though – even as Cas finally gets to wraps his hand around Sam’s shaking shoulders to hold him back and hold him upright, and looks at Dean so open and earnestly, like the angel who once pulled him from Hell. “He doesn’t mean this,” he assures.

“Yes, he does,” Dean says tightly, at the same time as Sam snaps, “Yes, I do! Why wouldn’t I? We’re talking about the whole fucking world here! What Dean did damned _everyone_ and he knew it, and even if he thought he was saving half of them, do you really think he’s so dumb that he didn’t think it might be sensible to at least wait until they actually needed saving before damning the other half?” He gasps for air, coughs so much he can’t talk anymore, but flinches back when Dean’s instinctively reaches for him. “Leave me alone, asshole,” he manages to get out. “This was never about saving the world, so don’t ever dare to use that as an excuse! This was about you giving up because you thought you were all alone in this with a fuck up of a brother to worry about on top of everything else, because you never even _tried_ to let me be your partner instead of your burden. And I know I fucked up, I know it’s all my fault-” He chokes on the last words, doubles over with a new coughing fit, Cas just barely keeping him upright, murmuring something that might be supposed to be calming, but Dean doesn’t hear any of it.

When Sam looks up again the tears are falling from his eyes. “...but I tried so hard,” he whispers. “I tried so hard to make up for it, to help you, but you never, never…” Once again he’s interrupted by coughing, just once, like an explosion that shakes his entire body and leaves the snow beneath him sprinkled with blood. “You would rather suffer on your own than accept my help,” he rasped on as if now he started he can’t stop for death, and Sammy, please fucking stop already, please go on. “And I really thought you used to love me not just because you had to.”

The last words Sam whispers even as his knees give out and he sinks into Cas’s arms, and then he keeps mumbling words into his friend’s jacket that Dean can’t make out, and Cas holds him so fucking close and Dean stands by and can’t move.

Eventually, Sam falls still. It can’t have taken more than half a minute but for Dean it felt like a year. Sam’s head falls back when Cas shifts him in his arms and Dean can’t stop staring at the blood on his colorless lips. Then Cas hoists him up and places him back on the carriage. It’s awkward, because Cas has to climb up himself and he can’t do that with his arms full of Sam, but Dean doesn’t move to help, just stands there and stares at empty air.

When finally he moves, he finds Jena sitting on her horse way ahead, passively watching with a calculating expression on her face. She doesn’t comment on any of it, just turns around and trots on as soon as Dean climbs onto the bench and takes the reins with fingers that are numb from the cold.

 

-

 

They don’t make it that much further before their next break, though it’s a small one and Dean can tell that Jena is eager to move on. They don’t even take the horse off the wagon to give it some freedom of movement but leave it strapped in as it drinks from a small creek and then eats from a bag full of straw that Jena organized at some point during their latest cave-vacation. The horses don’t seem to mind, though, and Dean doesn’t feel like stopping anytime soon. He’s not opposed to it either, though. He is, in fact, utterly indifferent to whatever they do.

When he turns around he sees Cas sitting with Sam and hears Sam’s small, shuttering gasps. Cas wiped the blood off his face but there are spots left on his vest. Dean stares, and then he jumps off the bench with the intend to pace around the carriage, but he doesn’t even manage that. After three of four steps he stops, looks at his friend and his brother, and hears himself says, “He’s dying, right?”

Cas won’t look at him. “Not right now, I believe.” His voice is oddly subdued, as if he was the one who just had his heart shattered not two hours ago. “It’s just the stress. He’ll recover from this.”

“Stress.” Dean snorts, feels like laughing and doesn’t. Stress is too harmless a word for it. And Cas never denied that Sam is dying – that he’s going to be alive tomorrow doesn’t change the fact that he will not be alive in a year, or maybe even a month. Dean needs a schedule for this, he finds himself thinking. He needs to know how much time he’s going to have, though he has no idea what to do with that time. None whatsoever.

Except defeat the Devil so that Sam’s death won’t bring any fucking inconvenience to the rest of the fucking world.

“Sam didn’t mean what he said.”

Dean doesn’t know why Cas feels the need to point that out, or why he tries to make Dean feel better, for that matter. It’s not like he usually bothers.

“He did. And he’s right.”

“He is,” Cas agrees somberly. “But he still didn’t mean it. In all those years he never blamed you. You need to understand that. Sam always saw the forces pushing and manipulating you, the weight on your shoulders. What you did was inevitable.”

Just like Dean always happily ignored the forces that manipulated and pushed Sam so much worse than they ever did him and laid all the blame on his brother’s shoulders. He doesn’t think Cas really means to be comforting here, but it doesn’t even matter. Not one bit, because Dean knows his brother and the way his mind works. “Please tell me he didn’t go through all that time blaming himself.”

“Of course he did.”

Yeah, of course. Stupid Sam. Stupid idiot of a little brother. For some reason that Dean will never understand he has been handed a free pass for everything by Sam and it took fever, weakness and withdrawal symptoms to finally make Sammy lose hold on his emotions and let them tell him what a failure his big brother really is. In a way, it’s a relief.

The loss it brings outweighs that by far.

 

-

 

Once again, they travel until deep in the night. According to Jena it’s another three days before they reach their destination, and she doesn’t seem too happy about that. Dean is worried for the opposite reason, because his brother is sick and in a few days he’s supposed to climb a mountain. Somehow, Dean doubts Sam will be up for that, especially if things continue to be “stressful”.

Cas joins him on the bench for the rest of the day while Sam tosses weakly through his nightmares. Maybe it’s Lucifer again – and this might be the best moment for the Devil to attack, when Sam’s defenses are down and he doesn’t even have an image of his brother to cling to. But if Lucifer invades his dreams, Sam doesn’t give in and they continue their journey unharmed.

Cas offered to take over the reins when they moved on and Dean understood the other offer in that. He shook his head and remained where he was, not talking for the rest of the day.

 

-

 

This time there is no river nearby when they rest. There are no trees either, just rocks, as so often. Left and right and behind them. The place they chose is in a small canyon but the river that formed it is long since gone. They make it into the maze of rocks as far as they can go with the carriage and then find a place for a fire, and Dean would hate how handy the wood they stole from the murdered strangers is now if he had any energy left to care.

The horses don’t like it much. There’s no food in this barren place and Cas tied them to the carriage to keep them from wandering off and getting lost, but apart from a few annoyed snorts and twitches, they remain calm. They aren’t nervous, just pissed.

The ground isn’t covered in snow but for a few spots, because the rocks beneath their feet are warmer than the rest of the area. Maybe it’s due to volcanic activity, or maybe a coal mine is burning out deep below. For all the horses don’t like it, this isn’t the worst place for their break. The soft but icy breeze that accompanied them all day doesn’t reach them and near the ground it’s almost warm. Dean sits on the rocks in some distance to the others as Cas is having dinner by their fire and Jena is having candy and they are talking about something he doesn’t understand, their voices just barely carried over to where he’s waiting for the night to go away.

The horses make soft noises, too. They nearly cover the soft creaking sounds the carriage makes as Sam climbs off it somewhere to Dean’s left and comes over, getting slower the closer he comes. Eventually he emerges behind a pillar of stone and stops, insecure and lost, a blanket wrapped around his shoulders like a shield.

“Don’t apologize,” Dean hears himself say, his words his own shield against what he knows is going to come. “Don’t you fucking dare!”

“I’m sorry,” Sam mutters, helplessly, automatically and inevitably. Dean wants to hug him but he doesn’t have the fucking right. He presses the balls of his fists against his burning eyes. “Come here,” he orders, his voice rough, and Sam obeys like he did when he was five and Dean was still his hero. Sits down an arm’s lengths away, too far to feel comfortable, but Dean reaches out and seizes his wrist in an iron grip, keeping him close.

“You have _nothing_ to apologize for,” he tells his brother, forcing the words out through a closing throat. “You were absolutely right with what you said.”

Sam shakes his head. “I didn’t mean that. Please Dean, you’ve got to believe me. I don’t even know-”

“Even if you didn’t mean it, you were right,” Dean interrupts him. “The only reason I’m not apologizing with every breath I take is because there’s no way to apologize for what I did. What I did to you.” He lifts his free hand and presses his calloused palm against Sam’s cool cheek. “I did run away. I wasn’t able to face that battle and the responsibility everyone was expecting me to carry. It was so much easier to blame you than to accept my own failure, and I wanted to hurt you because I needed you to let me go, and I’m so, so sorry.” A sob forces his way up his throat. “I should have known you wouldn’t ever do that. Hell, I had no fucking right to try and make you in the first place. But I was so stuck with feeling sorry for myself for having to bear all that on my own that I didn’t see all those who were there to help me. Who were just as stuck with it as me – even by choice, in Cas’ case.” He takes a deep breath, thinks that Cas’ decision to join their side for all the loss and pain it would bring makes him a hero rather than just a victim of circumstances like Dean.

And he never stopped to realize that Sam was just as deep in it as him – deeper even. There he was whining about having been manipulated to play a certain part while everyone felt sorry for him when Sam had been manipulated all his life and all he got out of it was scorn and blame. From Dean more than anyone. Because Ruby had hurt, and learning that Sam chose her not because he liked her better but because he was throwing his fucking soul away in order to help them had hurt even worse and Dean, raw from Hell, had never been able to get a grip on his emotions and react in any other way than push Sam away to punish the thing that hurt him.

He needs to say all this eventually, he knows. Needs to talk to Cas and give Sammy another speech, but he can’t right now, doesn’t know how, and there’s something more important he has to say.

“There’s just one thing you got wrong,” he tells his brother. “I do love you. I love you so fucking much, more than anything in the world. I love you so fucking much it scares me sometimes. That’s why I always end up hurting _you_ : because everyone else doesn’t matter.” _That’s why I ran away and gave in: Because I couldn’t bear to see you go first, couldn’t stand the thought of the Devil running around looking like you._ Dean doesn’t say that. He can’t put that on Sam’s shoulders, knowing his brother would see it as another confirmation of how everything that happened was his fault somehow. Instead, he pulls Sam a little closer, presses their foreheads together and says, “I’m so proud of you, Sammy. You can’t imagine how fucking proud I am.”

A sob escapes Sam’s throat and then his hands are grabbing for Dean’s shoulders and seconds later have him lying in Dean’s arms, sobbing helplessly and clinging to him for dear life while Dean has his arms wrapped around the skinny, shaking body, holding his brother as tightly as he dares, then as tightly as he can, like he could never let go again. Like he doesn’t want to.

He wonders just how long Sam has needed to hear those words. (It’s probably longer than they have been separated because Dean can’t remember having ever said them before and for all his psychic bullshit, he sometimes forgets that Sam can’t read his mind.)

They sit there, clinging to each other, for a long time. When they finally let go, Sam shivering with cold despite the much warmer air here, no guilt has been absolved for Dean, but something has loosened inside him and for the first time in forever Sam isn’t tense in his presence, not even a little. It’s a start. It something they can build up on.

And Dean accepts for the first time that for all his decisions have done to the world, it’s his brother who was always more important to him, and thus making things right with Sam is more important than anything else.

They continue to sit there, together, for a long time. They don’t speak, and for the first time in ages, Dean doesn’t even think but enjoys the moment, knowing it won’t last.

When Cas signals to them that they have to move on, Dean climbs onto the wagon with his brother without a word and together they huddle up against the cold.

 

-

 

In a way, Dean’s guilt gets even worse after that, and in a way, he should have fucking expected that. Now the guilt over what he did to his brother no longer overshadows everything, the guilt over the end of the world becomes more profound. He looks around and thinks of all the people who suffered and died because of him. He thinks of the thriving world that once was and the ruined wasteland that stayed behind. He thinks of Sam, waking from a sleep of centuries and seeing what’s become of the world he sacrificed so much for. Which means that in the end it all comes down to Sam again, but that’s okay, because Dean’s guilt hasn’t really lessened there either. Sam’s scars, the haunted look in his eyes, his nightmares and the cough that won’t lessen are constant reminders of what he suffered because of Dean and that he no longer thinks Dean hates him doesn’t actually change that at all. And yet, it makes everything that little bit easier to bear.

Sam is calmer as they travel on. He’s probably far from okay and Dean can tell Jena’s actions still wear on him, but he looks more peaceful than he has in a long time. Maybe ever since Dean returned. He’s quiet, though, probably worn out and maybe simply emotionally numb after the turmoil he went through in the last couple of days. But at least he’s no longer digging his nails into the wood of carriage as if his life depended on in, or trying to run off doing – well.

Either way, he seems less tormented, less restless, and that’s good. He’s also more awake, sitting at the end of the carriage with dangling legs as they move on and the ground passes beneath his feet.

They have been moving steadily upwards for a while. It’s not steep – in fact, the rise of the ground is barely notable, but when Dean looks back, the world falls away in a soft slope and the rocks between which they spend the night are a good bit below them.

Even though they are higher above sea level and by any right and logic it should be getting colder, Dean feels like the warmth of the small stretch of volcanic influence they long since passed is lingering with them. There’s hardly any snow on the ground, too, and they are moving a little faster now, a little easier. The sky above them presents itself in all shades of orange, with darker lines of dust that are driven across by a wind that down here they can’t feel.

By the standards of the world as it is, Dean supposes this qualifies as a good day.

He’s climbed back onto the bench with Cas after a while, leaving Sam some space, and when he left his brother’s side without a word and only with a hand to his shoulder, Sam leaned into the touch and Dean felt better than he had in ages.

Around midday they pass through a small forest with trees bearing small, brown leaves. The road isn’t as good here but they manage to move on well, and it’s odd how underneath the trees the temperature doesn’t change at all. This, as well as the lack of wind, makes all of this feel almost unreal.

Sam is still sitting at the end of the carriage when Dean climbs down to him with a bottle of water and some soft fruit from the left over supplies he hopes he can make his brother eat. Sam doesn’t turn when he crouches behind him, trying to keep his balance on the moving underground. “We’re being followed,” he says quietly, without any urgency at all.

All the calmness Dean is feeling is destroyed with that statement. He looks at Sam, but Sam keeps looking straight ahead at the forest they left behind just minutes ago. It’s slowly shrinking in the distance but Dean can still make out the three figures standing in the mouth of the forest, just barely out of the shadow of the trees.

Dean bites a curse beneath his teeth even as he recognizes them and knows without a doubt that they are not demons or angels as feared for a second. “Cas,” he says loudly and doesn’t have look to know that Cas is right now turning around, alarmed.

“Oh,” Cas makes.

The three figures stand motionless, reacting in no way to the fact that they have been discovered. Sam has probably been staring at them for hours, and Dean wonders why he didn’t say anything until now.

“How long have they been following us?” he asks.

Sam shrugs; a vague motion. “A while. I’m not sure. They’re not doing anything. They’re just there.” He sounds at the same time dull and sad. “Maybe they don’t know where to go.”

Somewhere along the way, Dean has figured out why there are so few ghosts around after so many people have died violent deaths. Ghosts have messages. They have something left to do, something they can’t let go of. But here, here there’s nothing to hold on to. Hardly anyone left to acknowledge their presence, hear their message however twisted it may be. Any ghost that lingers must eventually fade away, meaningless and forgotten. And perhaps most are even glad to leave this world behind and go with their reapers willingly.

Dean doesn’t know why these three, of all people, would stay. Perhaps it’s the circumstances of their deaths, perhaps it’s the fact that they were killed by a supernatural being. There’s no point in speculating about it, and Dean has no intention of asking them.

The three ghosts look after them but don’t follow, getting smaller and smaller in the distance as the wagon moves on.

“They never move,” Sam says as if reading Dean’s mind. “They just keep showing up.”

Dean looks back at Cas and they exchange glances that inform the other that neither of them quite know what to do. They should have burned the corpses, but it would have taken too long and the smoke would have attracted attention. Now they are stuck with three ghosts that doubtlessly are waiting for the chance to take revenge because why else would a ghost attach itself to its murderer? They can’t go back to take care of the bodies and they can’t deal with them unless the three come much closer and even then they can send them away only temporarily. They don’t have any salt, which doesn’t improve things at all. And ghosts have a tendency to go for the weakest member of a group first, which in this case is Sam.

It looks like Jena’s attempt to protect Dean’s brother by random murder backfired spectacularly.

Dean throws a glare at the skinny archangel, but Jena is riding far ahead and if she noticed what’s going on (and how could she not?) she doesn’t seem to think it’s a problem worth acknowledging.

 

-

 

The day passes and the ghosts don’t come any closer. They don’t go away either. Now he knows they are there, Dean keeps seeing them: in the shadow of a rock they just passed, as outlines before the distant horizon, or standing motionlessly on the road they are travelling. Always behind them; following, never ahead. It’s unsettling, but there’s nothing they can do about it.

Sam keeps watching them, but he doesn’t seem worried. Mostly, he seems worn. Sad. Dean knows his brother still feels guilty for their deaths, but the calmness with which he accepts their presence worries him.

At night, they stop as if nothing at all was different. There is no river nearly, not this close to the rocks that provide cover for them, so they do without fresh water, feeding the horses from their own supplies and leaving Dean hoping that they can restock the next day instead of wandering through a waterless area because that’s how their luck works. They are actually giving more than they would have had to, as it turns out, since one of the horses, the dark brown one, barely drinks two swallows and Cas is busy keeping the other one from going after the water in case the brown one will develop more thirst later. Cas keeps up the struggle for half an hour before he gives up.

At least one of them is still trying to keep itself alive, then. The other, Dean can tell, is in a pretty bad shape. It’s trembling and refusing all but a tiny little bit of food. It’s also shaking its head frequently as if trying to shake something off.

He feels sorry for the animal that has served them so well for so long, but his main concern is whether or not it will be able to carry them for another two days until they have to start walking anyway.

Sam doesn’t seem to notice and Dean doesn’t point it out to him. His brother is distracted by watching the area around them through heavy lidded eyes, but the shadows of night have swallowed everything and contrary to public believe, (most) ghosts aren’t exactly glowing in the dark. Dean doesn’t feel very good knowing they are there but unable to do anything about it, but that’s exactly what the situation is.

At least Jena has the grace to react to the threat in some way now. Her and Cas take sticks and carve Enochian symbols into the hard dirt all around the camp that are supposed to ward the ghost off. Dean suspects that Jena could simply smite them, but he also suspects that this action would be the equivalent of a flare gun to any supernatural being looking for them, and doesn’t ask for it.

They are not covered well and don’t dare to make a fire for the night. Dean is fine with that. It’s not too cold, anyway, not compared to the last couple of days, and he doesn’t feel like sitting around a campfire for dinner anyway. In fact, he skips dinner altogether. He’s too tired to be hungry and too tense to sleep.

As for Sam, he’s basically asleep sitting up. Dean eventually gently pulls him down until he’s lying flat and slips a hand over his eyes to close them, and when he pulls it away, Sam’s eyes remain closed and his breathing is already evening out. His low-grade fever is back, burning energy he doesn’t have and Dean tugs him in, sits beside him watching the dark, and worries.

 

-

 

Eventually, Dean falls asleep after all. Jena is keeping watch all night, and so is Cas, whom Dean trusts more to make a good job of it. He wakes when the carriage starts moving again, greeted by the multitude of shades of brown and orange that make the morning sky. Nothing at all happened last night.

The white-and-grey horse is pulling the carriage this time, while Jena rides the brown one that doesn’t look like it could take the weight anymore. Dean worries, and he worries about Sam, who’s so quiet, so pliant and almost lethargic. Though lacking appetite himself, Dean gives in to his hunger and unpacks the food he has stored in a bag nearby exactly for moments like this. He chews on a stripe of dried meat while picking out all the soft bits.

“It’s potato” he says as he slips a suitably small piece between his brother’s lips. “Don’t tell me you haven’t missed them. I know they were never your favorite, but boy – after so long with only roasted dog to eat, even _I_ like them.”

Sam doesn’t comment on that, but he obediently chews and swallows, and he doesn’t retch immediately, so Dean’s heart leaps a little and he feeds his brother the next bit. Soon everything that isn’t hard to chew or heavy too digest is gone, but that’s okay because Dean didn’t want to overdo it anyway. Sam’s stomach needs to get used to it again before it can handle larger quantities.

Cas, on the bench, sometimes looks at them but doesn’t say anything or try to stop Dean. He’s probably just as desperate for his friend to eat as Dean is.

Two days until they have to start walking. Sam is starving and one of their horses is dying. Not a good time for any of this. But Sam ate, and he’s keeping it down, and Dean begins to feel that little bit more hopeful.

Until Sam twists into a ball not ten minutes after Dean finished feeding him and moans as if someone shot him in the stomach. Dean can barely help him to lean up over the side of the carriage before he brings everything up again – all of that ridiculously small amount of food that was supposed to keep him alive.

Afterwards, Dean holds his trembling, miserable brother in his arms and strokes his hair, feeling guilty and hopeless.

They stop once, when they pass a small lake that obviously has lost a great amount of water in recent years but would still be large enough for them to swim in it if they were inclined to do so. They let the horses drink, but once again the brown one barely even tries. It reminds Dean of Sam in a way that’s more than a little disturbing.

They all refill their water supplies and Dean and Cas have a quick wash. Dean also soaks a cloth full of the surprisingly clear water and wipes down Sam’s face, neck and hands before wrapping him tightly into blankets. Sam won’t stop shivering. When Dean climbs off the wagon and onto the bench, he sees the three ghosts standing at the other side of the lake, watching them.

The thought comes unbidden that they might not be vengeful ghosts after all, but death omens.

Cas lies down with Sam, for the first time in days giving in to his need for rest. Sam is like a trembling rag doll in his arms, held securely, yet entirely without protection against his worst enemy. After a couple of hours, he whimpers and squirms out of Cas’ hold, not quite making it before he starts retching. Nothing comes up but a bit of gall that tickles down his chin. Cas cleans it away, makes him drink. Sam starts crying helplessly and Dean knows that even now he’s trying so fucking hard.

For Dean. It’s humbling, even if it isn’t anything else.

After that, Sam doesn’t fall back asleep. Whenever Dean turns he sees him with half-open eyes, blinking slowly and staring at nothing, long after Cas’ breath once again evened out. Whenever Dean looks up and at the road behind them, he sees the ghosts standing there, looking after them. They don’t come closer. They don’t go away.

By now it’s notable that they are a good bit above sea level. It’s still not as cold as down on the plains and it hasn’t snowed in days, nor does it look like it ever did up here. They are so close to the mountains now that some of their summits have disappeared from view, but Dean can still make out the white layer covering the highest of them, reaching just beneath the point where they disappear in the layers of dust that count as a sky here.

When a soft wind begins to blow, Dean is almost glad. It makes the air feel colder than it is, but it also makes him feel a little less as if they were moving through a photograph.

Eventually, Cas wakes up, having slept less long and deeply than last time. At that point, Jena makes an unexpected stop in the middle of nowhere and jumps off her tired, trembling horse to come over to the carriage. She climbs up and at the same time Cas climbs down over the side; they took whatever they could off the brown horse’s back so the carriage is too cramped to host three people at once.

Dean is confused but Cas seems to know what she’s up to because he moves without question or protest. And then Jena turns Sam around so he’s lying on his back, and Sam is all stiff and tense and maybe whimpering a little (Fuck you, universe!) and Jena places one hand to the back of his neck and the other to his forehead, closing her eyes in concentration. Dean has seen her do this before, but this looks different somehow. More intense.

Sam freezes and then he twitches a little, his fingers grasping at nothing because Dean isn’t close enough to hold his hand. After a long, tense time, Jena opens her eyes and lets go with a half-weary, half-frustrated sigh.

“What’s the prognosis?” Dean asks, dreading the answer.

“Well, you’ve seen what his body thinks about food.”

“It was too much at once. Not the right mix. We need to get him used to it again.”

She looks at him with something like pity in her eyes while Sam rolls away from her with a quiet moan. “You might be right,” she admits. “But we’re running out of time and I can’t bring him much further.”

As if that wasn’t obvious. Sam has been fading for days and Dean can’t pretend it’s only illness that makes his brother so weak.

Or so nervous and twitchy and restless.

Sam’s not even asleep right now, though Dean wishes he was, because then he’d know the little sounds his brother makes are due to nightmares – which would suck because Sam’s nightmares are hellish in the truest sense of the word, but it would still be better than this. It would be something they could wake him from.

Or it could be Lucifer, promising him _anything_. Maybe it wouldn’t all that much better after all.

Dean takes Jena’s place as soon as she shuffles off and back onto the poor horse that looks like it seriously considers falling over dead. He holds Sam, tries to comfort him while watching the ghosts and the sky. The clouds are much closer here, heavy and oppressing. The ghosts don’t leave. They aren’t aggressive, but they’re waiting.

Sam gets worse as the day progresses. More and more restless and distressed, not sleeping but not aware enough to react to anything Dean says or does. Dean tugs him in again and again to protect him against the cold wind that comes up every now and again, and again and again Sam wriggles out of his cocoon of blankets, unable to stand the restriction.

At this rate, he’s going to catch a cold on top of everything else.

The mountains are looming over them, and while they still have some way to go, Dean can already estimate the point at which they won’t be able to take the carriage any further. Perhaps they could have made a couple more miles on the narrow and steep paths awaiting them on horseback if they left the carriage behind, but at this point it’s unlikely that the brown horse will even make it that far, and even if it did, it would not be able to carry the two people it would have had to.

Perhaps they can keep the other, the healthy one for a little longer, though, so Sam can ride its back and won’t have to walk.

They move slower than before and Dean isn’t sure that’s good or bad. On the one hand, they need longer to the mountains which means longer for Sam to rest. Longer for him to re-learn how to eat. But the reason they are slowing down is that fucking poor bastard of a horse: Jena’s no longer riding ahead but mostly beside them, sometimes even falling behind. Dean worries what will happen if the horse isn’t going to make it. But then, maybe it’ll just mean Jena will have to walk, and they’ll be even slower and Sam will have more time. He could deal with that. Jena could handle the walking.

Or she can just ride the wagon. There’s room for two on the bench, two on the carriage, and really, the idea of having her that close all the fucking time shouldn’t freak Dean out like that. Especially since she’s the only one who can still help Sam even a little.

As it happens, her last treatment doesn’t seem to have done anything but give Sam the strength to toss around and make himself even more miserable. Dean wishes he would just finally fall asleep, preserve the energy he has. But the sky is already darkening by the time Sam’s irregular breathing evens out some and his fidgeting lessens.

His fingers still curl helplessly around air, and his eyes remain open just a bit, staring at nothing. Regardless, Dean eventually starts to drift off himself, lulled to sleep by the movement of the wagon and the lines of dust drifting across the sky.

He’s startled awake the moment Sam is. No time at all seems to have passed when Sam jerks in his lap and sits up, pushing himself upright on his arms so he can look over the sides of the wagon. His eyes are wild, and Dean’s heart leaps. He looks as well, half expecting the ghosts to flash forward right before them, finally ready to strike. But the ghosts are nowhere to be seen. What he sees are two other people stepping out of the small group of trees they are just passing.

All of Dean’s alarms are set off. The two men look ordinary enough: skinny, bearded, wearing a curious mix of animal skins and jeans. But they don’t seem surprised to see them. They don’t seem wary or delighted. There has been no place for days where they might have come from – there’s the mountain to the right, a steep slope going all the way down in a shortcut to the left, not far beyond the trees. It’s obvious that up ahead is not a good place to live, so these men have to be a far way from home. But worst of all, they startle the angels. Even Jena, who jerked around the moment Dean opened his eyes, their appearance taking her entirely by surprise.

“Hey there,” one of them says, waving lazily. “Fancy meeting you here. And there we thought we were the only living beings for miles.”  The man is taller than this companion, even more skinny, wearing more self-made clothes while the other one is dressed mostly in fabricated stuff left over from the old world and in surprisingly good condition. The fur-vest he wears over his far too thin shirt looks like a fashion statement rather than a practical article of clothing. The pair of them seems off from the moment Dean notices then, not only because the trees they step out of aren’t so thick that they would hide them from view for so long, let alone from the senses of an angel.

Ergo: they just appeared out of thin air. Dean wraps his arms around Sam’s shoulders, tries to pull him down, out of sight, but it’s too late. The men have already spotted him and from the expression of surprise on their faces, followed by delight, followed by more surprise, Dean can tell that they recognize him.

They know who Sam is, but pay no attention to Jena at all. So they are demons, not angels. It explains Sam’s reaction. Either way, they have been found.

Dean’s mind flies, assessing the situation, trying to figure out just how screwed they are even as he’s vainly trying to put himself between his brother and the danger, longing for a weapon that can kill demons. Apparently these two have no idea that there’s an archangel with them, have no idea that there’s something more dangerous around than a de-powered angel and a juiceless demon-blood addict, which means they can’t be any of Lucifer’s mooks. But they seem to have been looking for them, for Sam, so they have to be after _something_.

“Well, seems like we don’t need to bother with the charade,” the one who spoke before says. “Sam Winchester in the flesh. Never thought I’d see the day. Though I have to say, your appearance certainly doesn’t live up the expectations.” His eyes fall on Dean. “And you’re the great Dean, huh? Looks like all the rumors were true, for once.”

The man is tall and bearded, and for the clothes he’s wearing, the dirt on his face, Dean suspects that the vessel he’s wearing is brand new. Usually, demons, especially those who can jump around the world like a crewman of the Enterprise, tend to make use of that ability and collect proper clothes for dressing up. It’s a thing.

The other one has obviously ridden his host for much longer. His hair has receded to a halo around his head but it’s well kempt. He’s lean but well fed, dressed eccentrically rather than practically, and he’s actually slicked back his hair with what’s either the last pomade on earth or animal fat. His eyes rest on Sam and he grins in a leery, self-satisfied way that makes Dean want to jump him and tear off his head before he can get a single step closer.

Then his eyes fall on Castiel and his grin changes quality, though not in volume. “Cas, my friend. Didn’t think you’d make it this far. Remember me?”

Cas stares, but there’s no recognition on his face. The demon looks disappointed for a second, then he shrugs. “I changed, since then. That long guy from back then wasn’t really me. Also, he lost an arm in battle. Very inconvenient. Also a bad time to get back in control of your own body, but well, who gives a fuck? There are still enough meat suits running around – for those of us still able to change it, that is.” His expression turns pitying, his eyes still fixed on Cas. “Come to think of it, your vessel does look a little worn out. It’s a bitch being stuck in it, huh? You’re no better than a human, now. I could slice you to pieces, and there’d be nothing you could do about it.”

He takes a knife from his belt, stepping closer to Cas as if he didn’t have a care in the world. Cas reaches beneath his vest, but before he can draw his sword, an unseen force throws him off the bench of the wagon and onto the hard earth beneath.

Dean never even has a chance to react. From one moment to the next, without bothering with actual movement, the other demon, the taller one is behind him, his hand in Dean’s hair and a blade pressed to his throat. Sam turns around, something wild and nearly insane in his eyes that Dean can’t identify and doesn’t like, and the demon hisses, “Don’t even think about it!” before snapping his finger and sending Sam spinning around without even touching him. Dean’s brother hits the edge of the wagon hard and is left hanging there, either restricted by the demon’s power or simply unable to move, and Dean becomes aware of just how fucked they are. Cas is down, with the shorter demon standing over him and now in possession of his sword, Sam is helpless, possibly hurt, and Dean is, by all appearances, about to die. Only Jena is still active, but she’s doing nothing to magically save them all. So far, she managed to jump off her horse, but the demon holding Dean yells, “Don’t move, or I’ll carve out his eyes,” and beyond the blade that suddenly fills Dean’s field of vision with pointy horror, he sees her freeze in her movements.

“Good girl,” the demon praises her; Dean can hear the leer in his voice, he doesn’t have to see it. But Jena and her virtue are the least of his worries right now, the skinny girl without shoes the least vulnerable member of their group. “Who are you?” he growls. “What do you want?”

“We’re demons, since when do we need a reason for slaughter?” the one behind Dean replies. “But try vengeance. When you let Michael in, he had a couple of massacres among our kind, and he didn’t care about whether we belonged to Lucifer’s followers or not. Before, the angels didn’t give a fuck about us, and I guess much of his rage stemmed from frustration about _you_.” The knife before Dean’s eyes disappears to point as Sam instead. Dean jerks in the demon’s vice-like grip and a second later the blade nicks the skin of his neck. “Don’t worry, Dean, for your brother we have different plans. Call it convenience. He may watch as we take apart you and the angel and see if we can’t find some fun things to do with the bitch, and then we’ll take him along. And I don’t mean his body.”

“You belong with Crowley,” Cas voices what Dean just thought. His voice is pressed; he’s probably hurt. “What do you want with Sam?”

“What else? Make sure Lucifer won’t get him.”

“Because that worked so well the last time you tried,” Cas spits bitterly. He struggles to get up but doesn’t have any chance against the demon’s power. More human than angel.

“Oh, this time we have a better idea. Well, actually, _you_ had the idea. We’ll just adapt it to our needs. I gotta say, the way you managed to keep that soul hidden for so long was inspiring.”

Understanding dawns in Dean the same moment Cas cries, “That will never work! Lucifer made sure of it. No one can carry Sam’s soul like that anymore.” He wants to say more but is cut off by a hand around his throat.

“Like my friend there said, we adapted the method,” the demon standing over him informs him. “No one’s gonna carry that soul except to Hell. To some nice little corner that Lucifer won’t ever find. And then we’ll have all the time in the world to play with him while Satan keeps looking for his toy upstairs. Might even turn him into one of us – I wonder how _that_ would fit into the angels’ plans.” His face twists into an ugly grimace. “I gotta say, I have unfinished business with the kid. And with you, Castiel, but I guess I’ll have to take care of you right here, in a rush. It’s a pity, really.”

There’s a look of confusion on Cas’ face as he tries in vain to associate this demon with anything that happened to him and Sam in the past. The demon throws up his hands in frustration. “Oh, come _on_! You’ve gotta be kiddin’ me! After all, it was because of you that my nice little undercover mission within Lucifer’s army ended with my comrades dead and Satan taking my host apart out of frustration. Or boredom. You know, there’s actually a reason why we don’t like him.”

“I don-” Cas is interrupted by a cut off yell out of his own throat when the demon suddenly brings the angel- killing blade down on him. Dean jerks, can’t help it, but when the demon stands, he can see that Cas is still alive. The sword has gone through Cas’ palm, nailing him to the earth, and the demon leaves it there.

“I always wanted a sword that can kill angels.” The demon almost purrs. “But then, a butter knife could kill you now, right? It’s pretty pathetic – there you are, nailed by your own blade, and I bet you want nothing more than pull it out and kill me, right? Oh, if only you could.” He laughs, and Cas just lies there, unbound but completely unable to move. Dean throws a helpless look over to Jena but she still stands frozen, the very picture of pissed but unarmed helplessness.

“Serves you well for ruining everything and then forgetting about me. Don’t worry, I’ll help you remember after we’re done with Winchester over there.” The grip on Dean’s hair tightens, the blade nicks his neck some more, as if he needed pointing out that it’s not Sam the guy’s talking about this time.

“Your ugly faces all look the same to me,” Castiel spits out. “There can’t have been anything special about you, otherwise I would certainly have remembered.”

“Yeah? I thought I did quite well, back then.” The demon turns and comes over, but he’s not aiming for Dean. Dean can see Cas strain against the invisible hold nailing to the ground, fights against his own demon as well, but he can’t keep the asshole from touching his brother, from cradling his face and touching his hair.

Sam flinches. From his angle, Dean can only just make out his unfocused eyes and the thumb of the demon gently running over the scar on his face, the thin, white one that runs from forehead to cheek, right over his left eye. The one Dean noticed first thing when Lucifer showed him his vessel’s corpse.

“You remember me quite well, don’t you, Sammy?” the demon coos, and the one behind Dean snickers – and the next moment the demon before Sam gives a startled yell and draws back his hand. Except he can’t, because his finger is still stuck between Sam’s teeth, and Sam’s spindly fingers close around his wrist to keep it there. The other one yells a warning that is cut short by a surprised yelp and then nothing, the knife he held to Dean’s throat falling from suddenly lifeless fingers. Cas frees himself of the blade and jumps up, the hold of the demon broken. He comes running over, but he doesn’t make it before the demon managed to tear his hand from Sam’s unexpectedly strong grip and backhanded him hard enough to send him flying sideways. With a yell, Dean lungs for him and the demon takes a step back, right into the blade Cas pulled out of his own hand.

And then they’re both dead and the whole fucking situation that got bad so quickly is over just as quickly. Except that Cas is bleeding from his hand and Dean is bleeding from his neck and Sam looks up at Dean with blood on his lips and tears in his eyes and Dean just wants to fucking scream.


	15. Chapter 15

Jena does exactly what Dean expects her to do: she bleeds the demons out, fills two flasks with their blood and stores them away. Sam watches her do so sitting on a stone and rocking back and forth, his arms wrapped around himself, shivering endlessly. His lips are moving, but Dean can only make out his words when his brother finally looks at him and sobs, “I’m sorry.”

‘It’s okay,’ Dean wants to say. He can’t get his lips to move, his voice to work, though, and Sam looks crushed; heartbroken and guilty, and Dean’s doing that, he’s doing it _again,_ which means he needs to make his brother (his little brother, fuck) understand that it’s not him he’s angry with but the whole fucking world. So he scoots over and pulls Sammy into his arms then, holds him close and lets him sob into his shoulder.

He rather feels like crying himself.

They have no time to linger and offer each other comfort, though. As soon as Jena got all the blood the flasks can hold out of the dead bodies, she urges them to move on, having no patience for either of their emotional states. She doesn’t mount her horse this time but only loads it with some lighter bags and leads it by the reins, walking at a brisk pace. They’re probably faster this way than if she were riding the weakening animal.

The wound on Dean’s neck doesn’t stop bleeding. He eventually gives up just applying pressure to it and wraps a makeshift bandage around it, nearly strangling himself in the process as the wagon rumbles over uneven ground. He’s taken the reins out of necessity, because Cas is hurt, his hand bleeding like crazy. He’s in the back, trying to bind his own hand and not quite succeeding. Sam sits beside him, eying the blood running over the fallen angel’s hand with something like insanity in his eyes, something that makes Dean want to jump over and hold him down whenever he looks back at them. But when Sam does move, it’s to help his friend, his own hands trembling so hard it doesn’t make much difference.

“Does it hurt?” Dean hears him ask quietly, and Cas replies, “It’ll heal. I’m not angel enough anymore for this to permanently disable me,” which isn’t really an answer.

The cut in Dean’s neck hurts like a bitch, but it’s only when he starts thinking about it that he even notices. It mostly hurts when he turns around, but that doesn’t stop him. It’s not just his brother and their friend he keeps looking at, he’s also keeping watch for any signs that they are being followed, by ghosts or by demons. There are none, but the demons they just met appeared out of nowhere, too, so that’s not actually very encouraging.

“How could they find us?” he asks Jena when she is walking right beside him. “I thought we were protected from discovery.”

“We’re protected from discovery by supernatural means,” Jena corrects him. “No angel or demon can sense us. But they can still track our traces. In this case, I fear they just got lucky. Maybe they were possessing someone from the village we passed. Now we can only hope that they were demons about it and neglected to tell anyone else about us, wanting to get all the praise for themselves. Otherwise, the rest of the journey is going to be decidedly less pleasant.”

“But it would be just demons, right?” Demons would be bad enough but angels would be much, much worse. If it was really by coincidence that these demons found them, they might have a chance, but if Crowley once had undercover-agents among Lucifer’s troops, maybe Lucifer has undercover-agents in Crowley’s.

“I would hope so. It really does look like a lucky find, though. The demons were speaking of rumors and didn’t know about me. They can’t know too much about what went down in Detroit beyond the fact that Sam is back now.” She throws a quick, somewhat worried glance at Dean’s brother and Dean automatically does the same. Sam is half-lying in Castiel’s lap, the angel’s good hand stroking his hair. He’s shivering constantly.

For once, Jena makes no comment to tease Dean about Sam’s and Castiel’s closeness.

They have to stop not long after because Jena’s horse can barely keep up anymore and even the one pulling the wagon is getting tired. It had the harder task for days now with its companion slowly giving up the ghost and in the end there is no other choice but to stop beside the first pond they find to let the horses drink and rest. No one likes it. Both angels are tense, their senses obviously set on the environment, listening for anything out of the ordinary so they won’t get surprised again. Dean is no less tense, his attention divided between the slope of the mountain to the right, the meager trees to the left and Sam, who is just as tense, but for entirely different reasons. He’s writhing weakly in Cas’ arms, his nails digging into his own arms. Dean isn’t sure the outside world even exists for his brother anymore.

Jena climbs around beside him, kicking parts of their luggage off the wagon – mostly the remaining logs they stole from the collection of the murdered villagers, and Dean is overcome by the absurd hope that the ghosts were only after these and will bother them no longer. For Dean and the others, the wood now only creates weight and takes up space they need for the stuff the brown horse was originally carrying, since they can’t risk making a fire anymore.

Even though they don’t intend to stay for long, Dean reluctantly frees the grey and white horse from its harness so it can rest properly. It drinks greedily while the other one just kind of sniffs at the water a little, but when he offers it food it turns its head away and trots off to lie down in the first available space. Dean’s stomach sinks. They still have two days to go.

Suddenly, randomly, he’s glad that they never gave the horses names.

In the end they can’t take the state of the animals into consideration too much, can’t rest for too long. They move on but it’s slower now. Jena keeps leading her horse, letting it carry their bags instead, and Cas is walking as well, further reducing the weight the other one has to pull. Still they barely keep going until nightfall when the weaker horse refuses to take another step.

They take another reluctant break. Jena keeps growling at both their horses as if they hadn’t worked themselves to death from them, but even if they’d been healthy, they wouldn’t have made it any further this day. It’s getting too dark to keep moving on in this area.

At least one of the horses still drinks, but even that one is starting to look unwell now. It might be better to abandon the wagon soon, but Sam is ill again, whimpering and tossing and feverish, and he can’t stay in the saddle all day. The whole situation pretty much sucks.

The brown horse disappears at some point that night. Dean notices its absence when the first light of morning lets the mountain loom over them as a giant shadow, and they get ready to move on. He finds it behind a rock and doesn’t recognize it at first, because it’s not only dead, it looks like it has been dead for days.

Smells like it, too. Up close, the stench of rotting flesh almost makes him gag.

“What’s with the fucking horse?” he hisses when he finds Jena not far away, tapping her foot impatiently as if just waiting for him so they can leave. She frowns at him before getting what he’s talking about. From where they are she can’t see the dead horse, but at least she’s looking in the right direction.

“Not a big loss at this point. It was past its expiration date anyway,” she shrugs.

“By a long time, by the look of it!” Dean isn’t confused because he’s been dealing with supernatural shit all his life. He’s just fucking incredulous.” Please tell me we didn’t travel with a zombie horse all this time!”

Jena, as expected, doesn’t seem to have a problem with that. “No normal horse would have been able to get us this far on so little and pulling one out of thin air would have attracted attention. It’s not a zombie as such.”

“What’s it, then?”

“Undead.”

Sometimes Dean feels like inflicting a similar state on her. Just possible without the ‘un-‘.

Beside him, the living horse snorts softly. Though ‘living’ might be too strong a word in this case. Dean looks into its dark eyes and can’t help the urge to take a step back.

But it can’t be helped. They have to leave – not just because they are on the run and actually feeling it for once, but also because they are running out of horse-power. They need to make it as far as possible with the one they have left, and they need to keep the wagon as long as they can. Their horse is running out of vitality, but at least it might be able to pull for another day.

One more day Sam can rest. Somehow, Dean expected him to get magically better now he got his demon blood. As much as Dean hates the thought of Sam using again, he’s actually shocked that it didn’t help.

It changed things for Sam, sure. But now he’s just miserable in another way. And probably hating himself, the fucking moron.

Dean knows he shouldn’t put too much weight on the wagon, which means he has to walk as Cas has already taken the place on the bench, but he climbs up to Sam anyway, just for a moment, to make him drink. They left him alone during the break, let him sleep while they all stayed awake and tense and watchful, but he needs to drink something, and despite everything it’s only water Dean brings to his dry and cracked lips, nothing else.

Sam blinks at him. He has slept but not rested, the nightmares being worse than ever. His body is hot when Dean touches him and most of the water runs down his chin.

The carriage isn’t moving yet; Cas and Jena are waiting for him to get done. Dean still takes his time to carefully settle Sam back down. With a sigh he takes in the state of his brother’s forearms, scratched raw by his own nails.

Sam immediately rolls away from him, curling up like a child. Dean covers him in a blanket without any hope he won’t kick it off in a matter of minutes. When he looks up the ghosts are standing not fifteen feet from then, just outside the line of symbols drawn around their camp.

Dean jumps, his hand instinctively closing around the knife in his belt. But the ghosts don’t try to attack. They just stand there, staring, with no expression on their faces. They’re staring at Sam, and Sam whimpers and cries out softly.

“Fuck off!” Dean tells them and one of them actually reacts, shifting his gaze ever so slightly so he looks into Dean’s face instead. His eyes are dull. Then he flickers out of existence, followed not a second later by his companions.

“They won’t come back,” Jena says when Dean finally climbs off the wagon and they start moving, up the path, toward a spot on the slope of the mountain Dean believes is their goal if only because it looks like a good place to cross.

“Did they get what they wanted?”

“Perhaps. Perhaps they just know they won’t. But they’re moving on now. I felt it.”

Maybe it were the ghosts the led the demons here. Either way, Dean is glad they are gone. They walk briskly and their undead horse can keep up for a long time. There’s a break around midday, as usual. They eat, and Dean falls asleep beside his brother, exhaustion putting him out like a light. When he’s woken, the light has barely changed and he feels like his limbs are covered in lead.

He is woken by Jena climbing over him and watches, torn and unhappy, as she sets the flask with the demon blood to his dying brother’s lips and makes him drink.

 

-

 

After the break, the remaining horse is a little fitter than before, but in the end its strength runs out more quickly than the other one’s had, since it still has to pull the wagon all the time. So after their rest for the night night, they take all their bags with supplies and clothes and weapons and leave the wagon behind. Instead of pulling the heavy thing all the time, the horse now just has to carry Sam, who can stay on its back without help and is so damn much better than he was before that night.

He also refuses to look Dean in the eyes.

“It’s not a big loss,” Jena explains when they move on, Dean leading the horse while keeping half an eye out for any evil zombie-tendencies. “A little further up and the path would have gotten too narrow for the wagon anyway.”

“How much further?” It’s Cas who asks. For once, he doesn’t seem to have much knowledge about the area, and for once Dean wishes he had, because that would mean they wouldn’t depend on Jena quite this much. The ghosts are gone but that doesn’t mean he has forgotten what she has done – and it is obvious that Sam doesn’t trust her anymore, not in the least.

“If the horse makes it that far, we should have to leave it by nightfall. There’s a bit of a labyrinth of possible paths up ahead, which is one reason why I chose this route.”

Dean can imagine that. And he likes it – the fact that so far there has been only one path to take, he never was comfortable with. It makes them far too easy to follow.

On the other hand it means that without Jena they’ll probably be lost.

The path is already a lot steeper than it was before. It’s narrower, too – passages with them walking along the steep edge of a canyon alternate with passages framed with rocks on both sides that soon get so narrow the wagon wouldn’t have fit through them. It gets increasingly hard for the horse, but it’s increasingly hard on Dean, too. His feet are hurting and his head pounding from lack of food and drink when they settle down for their last, short rest before nightfall.

Dean eats and drinks more than he has in days, his body finally demanding its right. Sam takes a small sip from the flask Jena hands him and doesn’t look at anyone. The horse refuses to drink and Sam refuses to get back on the horse claiming the poor thing can’t take it. In the end he only gives in because he doesn’t have the energy to argue. And because it’s getting dark and they’re running out of time. And perhaps because they all feel exposed at the side of the mountain, here, where hardly any trees grow to hide them, and he wants to move on as quickly as possible.

The horse makes it till nightfall and no further. They keep going until it gets too dark to move on safely and as soon as they stop, the horse collapses and dies. Or rather, it returns to its natural state. Whatever. Either way, it did not wait for Sam to get off before doing so and he falls hard against the rocks, getting half buried beneath the already rotting corpse. Jena curses a lot as they pull him away and upright and as she checks him over. Sam says he’s not hurt.

Dean just wants to put him in his pocket and keep him fucking _safe_.

They move away from the horse’s corpse even though it’s dark and they can barely make out anything. The air is thinner up here, though only a little colder than below, and the sky is hanging right above their heads. It seems darker by day than it did before, but by night it actually offers that little more light and they make it up some seemingly randomly chosen path – one of many. The damn horse couldn’t have chosen a better place to kick it.

Still, the path is full of shadows. At some points they need to crawl up on all fours and Dean managed to cut open his palm on a sharp edge. Sam tries not to show it but he’s limping visibly, for all he claims the fall didn’t hurt him. And Cas has trouble with the climbing, his injured hand bothering him more than he likes to admit.

As expected, it’s Sam who has to give up first. But by the time he lets himself fall against a rock and doesn’t get up, they are far enough from the horse not to smell it anymore, and Jena allows them to take a break. They try to get comfortable, with Cas coaxing Sam up so he can shove blankets under him and Sam fussing over the fact that he’s only using one hand to do so while Dean quietly wipes the blood off his own hand and rummages through his bag in search for food and water.

Mostly water. He’s been breathing hard with the effort of climbing and his throat feels like sandpaper.

So he drinks half a gallon and passes the bottle on to Sam who drinks two sips because his throat has to be dry as well and sometimes water helps better than anything else, even if Sam’s body barely knows what to do with it anymore. It hurts Dean to think that his brother is hardly human now so he doesn’t think about it and focuses instead on handing out food to Cas, who accepts it gratefully.

When a soft wind begins to blow and makes the subjective temperature drop by ten degrees, they share the blankets between them and sit huddled together in the dark with Sam drifting off between them and Jena keeping watch as a dark outline against the sky.

 

-

 

The view quickly gets worse the higher they wander. They are up inside the clouds of dust now and Dean half-expects them to get out on the other side any moment, to find blue sky and a bright sun waiting for them. But that won’t happen. He doesn’t need to ask to know that these clouds go higher than any mountain on earth.

It’s not surprising that Sam’s cough gets worse. There’s the thin, dusty air, and this is the first time in weeks he’s had to walk long stretches on his own. Now, running on demon blood, he’s stronger than he was ever since they saved him from Lucifer’s clutches, but that’s like saying a pebble is larger than a grain of sand. He’s far from being well, strong, or capable of climbing over rocks for long distances.

The dust is all round them. They can’t see the valley anymore and if there’s anyone coming up the path they wandered for so long they won’t know it until their pursuers are basically sitting on them. It does nothing to make them feel safer, and Dean feels like Sam’s painful coughs have to be heard for miles.

They have to take breaks more often now they all have to walk, and though those are mostly for Sam’s benefit, Dean appreciates them as well. It’s hard, dragging themselves and their stuff up a mountain like this, and while he’s healthy and well-fed in comparison to his brother, he also keeps losing weight due to too little food on too much exercise and his stamina is not what it used to be.

Even Castiel can’t quite keep up with Jena because his injured hand keeps him from climbing the more difficult passages with ease. They are hardly the most impressive or the most intimidating troupe ever out to kill the Devil. All they need now to make it perfect is Bobby in his wheelchair, Dean thinks, and then he has to think of something else before he can start to cry.

“You’d think she actually wasted some thought on choosing the most difficult trail,” he grumbles during a short break, when he changes the bandage around Castiel’s hand. “Fuck, this looks bad. Are you sure you can make it?”

“It looks worse than it is,” Cas claims. “It would heal faster if I could leave it uncovered, but as long as our activity makes the wound break open so often, it would leave too obvious a trail of blood.” His gaze falls on Dean’s hand, currently wrapping the gauze around his palm. “You are bleeding as well.”

Dean looks at his palm. He didn’t even notice it bleeding again, but it’s not bad, just a little blood smeared over his skin. “I don’t think that left any obvious traces.”

Cas looks at him as if he’s stupid. “You’re hurt.”

“Between the three of us, that scratch is hardly the gravest injury on display.” Out of the corner of his eye, he sees his brother drag himself up to them, apparently attracted by all the talk about injuries. “Sam’s about to collapse,” he says quietly, hoping only Cas can hear him.

Cas just makes a vague gesture that’s not even a shrug, as if to ask what he’s supposed to do about that.

“Why didn’t you tell me you’re hurt?” Sam asks when he finally makes it up to them. He looks like a kicked puppy, like Dean somehow betrayed him by not lamenting his cut hand – or worse, like he feels guilty for not noticing, when he’s clearly been distracted by more important things like walking and breathing. He’s pale, his eyes are blood-shot, and he’s breathing so fucking hard and roughly. “Let me carry one of your bags.”

“Fuck off, Sammy,” Dean growls. “We actually want to make it somewhere this century and you rolling down the mountain under the weight of a few blankets would be quite the setback.”

Sam glares and tries to punch him in the arm, which means he’s miserable on a tolerable level. Getting his energy back. Thank you so fucking much, Demon Blood!

“Hey, do you, you know.” Dean can’t even fucking say it, he hates the stuff so much. “You need more? To go on? You really don’t look so peachy.”

“It’s fine,” Sam assures him the same moment Cas says, “It will do for today.” Dean turns to him because that’s easier than discussing this with Sam.

“How can you tell? He barely had anything at all and the day’s still long.”

“It’s going to be enough. We do not have much and do not know when we will get more.”

He says it without concern, as if Sam’s not breathing hard and twitching and trying so obviously to put on brave face (and wasn’t this supposed to be a miracle cure? Wasn’t this supposed to make him feel better, at least, while it destroyed him?), so Dean wonders how often his demon blood addicted brother got through their adventures on the skin of his teeth before. Because Sam shakes his head as well, fucking used to rationalizing.

It seems there’s not enough of anything, for him, in the world.

They are also running out of food, not having seen anything to hunt in days. Sam’s not the only one who has to be careful with his supplies and Dean is getting used to being constantly hungry again. The mountain still looms over them, and he just knows that there’ll be another one looming right behind this one once they made it to the other side. The wind has picked up, is making them shiver, is carrying dust that smells like ash (people burned in the cities and gone to the sky, if not to Heaven) and makes Sam cough all the time.

Up ahead, the rocks that cover them get less and less. Soon they will be utterly exposed on the side of the mountain, hidden from view only by insubstantial clouds Dean is pretty sure any demon or angel can see through. It’s not too steep – they are not crossing over the summit, after all, are just crawling along the side, but he still doesn’t look forward to spending another night up here.

Fortunately, they don’t have to. Even up here Jena can find caves. In fact, they come across a lot of caves, but she’s after a special one and picks her chosen opening in the mountain just before dark. It looks like all the other caves, but Dean is fine with it. Inside it’s dark. There are walls all around, it’s surprisingly airy but protected from the wind. It doesn’t smell like animal. That’s all Dean wants from a room anymore.

Well. A little more light would have been nice, too, and a fire for warmth and cooking.

Maybe there’s a plan to that, though. If they can’t find food, they can’t waste their supplies. Dean’s hungry when they settle down, but not so hungry he would bother searching for more than his water bottle without being able to see. In the dark he pulls Sam towards him and holds him close. Together, they sleep through the night.

 

-

 

The next morning finds Cas sitting in the mouth of the cave, keeping watch. Dean longs, more than in ages, for coffee as he makes his way over to him, and Sam reaches out to him in his sleep, whimpering quietly with loss.

“Where’s Gabriel?” Dean asks in a whisper so his voice won’t wake his brother. But Sam’s already stirring. He’s been restless all night.

“She left before you fell asleep last night.”

“How’s that an answer? When will she come back?” Dean realizes that he has accepted the reality of Sam’s dependence on demon blood when his first thought is that Jena has the flasks with the blood Sammy needs, and not that Jena apparently abandoned them in the mountains.

“Here I am! Fresh as spring and with more useful luggage!” Jena singsongs as she comes in, her small form only briefly blocking the light falling in through the narrow entrance. She walks straight past Cas, half-climbs over Dean and sits beside Sam who’s already rising to meet her. The damn flask appears, Jena cradling the back of Sam’s head as she sets it to his lips, and all too soon it is taken away again.

Since Sam had his breakfast, Dean and Cas eat as well, though not much and not taking their time. Sam keeps to the side, withdrawing to himself, and once Dean figures out that he’s ashamed because of the blood-drinking, he scoots over and half-pulls Sammy into his lap to let him know without words that he still loves him.

They don’t linger long for much longer, but instead of leaving the cave as Dean expected, they walk further into it. The presents Jena brought them, it turns out, are torches, and they each get one as they walk into the darkness.

The cave they slept in is but part of a whole system of caves and tunnels and apparently it leads all the way to the other side of the mountain. Which should be awesome: They are protected from the wind and from discovery and don’t have to climb up the slope all the time anymore. But these caves weren’t made for walking; they are natural constructs that don’t take into consideration that humans like their floor flat and even. There’s still enough climbing going on, except now they are also carrying torches they have to deal with.

It’s not too bad, though, and Jena knows her way around. Dean still doesn’t like it. He just doesn’t. The dark around them is oppressive and full of things they don’t see. The silence seems to be lurking and looming. His subconscious is constantly playing tricks on him, and all too easily someone (Sam) could get lost in here.

Altogether, it feels like they are walking into Moria, just without the Balrog and the dead dwarves.

He keeps close to Sam, more scared of losing sight of him than of Jena who is dancing up and down the rocks before them. But Sam keeps up with them fine, much better than he has any right to manage. There’s a determined expression on his face Dean has last seen when chasing Lilith and his eyes are almost glowing in the dark. But he’s also running a fever and needs all his determination to make it through their journey, so Dean has no reason for the shiver that runs down his spine.

“Hey Sammy,” he says at some point, his voice just loud enough to be heard over Sam’s harsh breaths. “Remember that one time you got lost in the mirror-maze at that carnival?”

“That _haunted_ mirror-maze.” Sam smiles weakly and a little sourly. “Yeah, I kind of remember that.”

“Really? You were, what? Nine?”

“Exactly. I was nine and got lost in a haunted mirror maze with a ghost! It was a kind of traumatizing experience.”

“Dad had already killed the ghost.”

“Yeah, but I didn’t know that.”

Dean smiles at the memory. He’s had his fun teasing his little brother about it for months afterwards, but the truth is that at the time it happened it wasn’t funny at all. He remembers all to clearly the panic that had come over him the moment he realized his little brother was nowhere to be seen ( _watch out for Sammy he’s still small can barely handle a gun there’s a ghost out there no dad killed the ghost dad killed the ghost but there are people and big machines and Sammy must be scared Sammy might be hurt please don’t be hurt_ ) and the relief that washed over him when Sam stumbled out of the mirror maze and buried his little face in Dean’s chest trying not to cry because he was supposed to be a big boy now.

Awesome memories.

“You bawled like a baby,” he says.

“Did not.”

“Did too. I thought you had reverted in age ten years.”

“I was nine! Dude, you did deserve your bad marks in math.”

“I only got bad marks because the teacher was too distracted by my handsome face.”

“Sometimes I think your ‘handsome face’ was the only reason you passed your classes at all.”

“Hey! I was awesome in school!”

“Yeah, awesome with the girls.”

“Is there another reason to go?” Dean grins. This feels nice. This feels so fucking nice and yet he knows he has to tread carefully so he doesn’t make any remark that turns Sam’s thoughts to the dreams he had to give up or the love of his life burning on the ceiling.

He used to be not quite this considerate. Banter was a lot easier then.

“Is that why you would rather spend your time in intercourse with a girl in the closet instead of participating in class?” Cas’ voice interrupts his thoughts.

Dean turns and sees the fallen angel right beside him, the flickering light of their torches casting shadows all over his face. “Dude,” he says. “Did you guys spy on teenage-me having sex? That’s just creepy. And disgusting. Seriously, didn’t you have anything better to do?”

“We did spy on you a great deal,” Cas admits without batting an eye. “Though I would not know of any of my brothers and sisters to purposefully seeking you out in such situations.”

 “Well, what a relief.” It really is. Dean wouldn’t have liked to learn that he was living The Trueman Show: The Porn Edition. But the question remains, and the answer is possibly even more creepy. “Than how do you know that? Did _you_ –”

“Sam told me,” Cas interrupts him with mild irritation on his face.

Dean turns to glare at his brother, who just shrugs and lacks any sign of guilt. “We spend a lot of time together,” he reminds Dean. “We talked.”

 _‘As if I could forget that,’_ Dean nearly says – but the truth is, he almost _has_ forgotten it, has over the new closeness with his brother (that he doesn’t deserve, that he treasures the way he should have all along) kind of lost focus on the fact that Sam and Cas spend more time together than Sam and Dean. They were brought close by the constant struggle and suffering Dean’s mistakes have brought them, but there was more to their life than that.

Even if it wasn’t a lot. Even if it was just making fun of Dean and his understanding of school.

“And you had nothing better to talk about but me?” he wonders, trying to keep the tone light. “I bet you left out all the embarrassing details about your own childhood.”

“You weren’t there to defend yourself.” Sam smiles as he says it but is biting his lip at the same time and not looking at his brother who wants to kick himself.

They have reached a point in their relationship where everything they bring up in some way or another hurts.

As if to underline that, Cas says, “Sam did tell me about his own childhood. He told me that when he was little he wanted to grow up to be just like you.” Yeah, he knows how to twist a knife, and from the way he looks at Dean, Dean knows without a doubt that he meant to.

“Cas,” Sam says quietly. Cas looks back at him with something hard in his eyes. Straight past Dean as if he weren’t there. “Sam.” His voice isn’t hard, but unrelenting. He has something to say and Dean gets the message, okay? He fucking gets it.

Even now, here, with Dean figuratively and literally between them, Sam is more at ease in Castiel’s presence than he has ever been before everything went down the drain.

“Boys,” Jena’s voice interrupts his thoughts and their conversation. “Watch where you’re going.”

She’s waiting for them, for the first time since they entered the caves, and as they come closer, Dean can see why. “The next bit is going to be hard,” she needlessly points out. “Guess we better rest now.”

Well, there’s a good idea. Dean would approve of it even if they weren’t travelling with someone who three days ago couldn’t even walk on his own. Not that he can see much of the way ahead with the darkness swallowing the light of the torches like ink, but he can tell that it’s steep, and narrow, with the ground opening and falling away on one side.

What Dean can see from here does not offer any place to just stop for a moment and rest. He can’t see far, so maybe it gets better.

He can’t see far, so he doesn’t have any idea how long this part is.

So Sam is feeling better. Awesome. Sam’s breathing hard already, and he looks sick in the light of the torches. They don’t let him carry a backpack because it would exhaust him too much. Jena has to be insane if she thinks he can make this.

Judging her insane was the first thing Dean did when he met her, long before he knew who she even was.

They take their time, sit on rocks without talking. The silence is absolute. If there was anything in the darkness coming for them, they would hear it, so why does Dean still feel like they are being stared at?

He and Cas drink from their bottles while they eye the path ahead apprehensively. Dean would worry about that part and falling to his death if he wasn’t more worried about Sam falling to his death.

While they drink and nibble some food, Jena comes over to Sam, fills some blood – just a few drops – into her open palm and has Sam lick it off. Dean hates that she does it like this, though it’s probably just to keep him from drinking too much. It looks too intimate.

If it has to be done like this she should leave it to him. (The expression on Sam’s face just fucking breaks his heart because Sam despises her but he needs this so, so much.)

One of the torches dies while they wait, reminding them that they have to hurry on top of everything else. Jena lights a new one and doesn’t seem worried, but Dean doesn’t know how many more she has. Their supply can’t be unlimited.

When they go, Jena goes first, of course. It looks ridiculously easy as she basically dances on the wall of rocks, but then, she can fucking fly. Cas is next, and he brings the rope and ties it around every rock that allows it while Dean ties the other end around Sammy and he still thinks _Don’t fall, don’t fall_ , because they can’t rely on that rope and even if they could, it would hurt and Sam might injure himself and the rope would cut into him while they pulled him back up.

(He remembers being sick, how hard it seemed them to even lift a backpack with weak and trembling arms. The arms Sam’s life depends on are just like that. Like fucking rubber.)

Dean goes last, trying to stick close to Sam without getting in his way. He can’t fucking help him. If Sam falls, Dean won’t be able to do anything but watch.

His own heart is racing. He can feel a soft, cold breeze coming up from below, only notable because it’s the only movement in the air for hours, and thinks about letting his torch fall to see how deep it is and doesn’t. They need to be pragmatic and not dramatic.

It’s not as hard as he thought it would be. The wall isn’t quite as vertical, the path not quite as steep and narrow. Most of the time they can easily crawl upwards, but there are passages where they have to cling to the rocks while their feet are feeling for the next hold. One arm always wrapped around something while the weight of their bags seems to drag them down into the darkness. They’re only using two torches now, so the one facing a difficult part can always pass it back or forth and work with both hands. When he can, when there’s room for it, Cas is waiting on the other side of the obstacle, wrapping his arms around Sam as soon as possible to pull him over. Most of the time he can’t.

It’s easier than Dean thought it would be but it’s a far cry from being actually _easy_. And the passage is fucking long, and at some point, after a particularly long and difficult bit that had him depend solely on the strength of his arms more than once, Sam presses himself face first into a gap between the rocks, sinks down until he’s almost kneeling and doesn’t move on.

There’s just enough room for Dean to crouch beside him. “What’s wrong?” he asks, but Sam just shakes his head, his horsehead pressed against the stone before him. This close Dean can hear his brother’s ragged breathing and when he puts a hand to his shoulder, Sam is trembling so hard.

Cas is already behind the next obstacle, the next thing Sam has to get past. Followed by the next one and the next one. Dean strokes his back, feeling his own heart race with exhaustion and tension. “Take your time,” he says quietly and Sam slips further.

“Cas,” Dean calls into the dark. “We need a break.”

“This is not a good place.” Cas voice sounds closer than expected but he’s invisible from where they re sitting.

“Sam can’t move on.” It doesn’t leave much room for discussion.

“He can. It’s not much further.”

“He fucking _can’t_ , okay? Just give us a minute.”

Dean can’t hear Cas sigh but he imagines him doing so. Sam turns his head just so as he shakes his head again and Dean can see the tears running down his face. “I can’t,” he whispers breathlessly. “I can’t. I’m sorry.”

“Yes, you can,” Dean says gently, shifting a little, but the path is so narrow he has to be careful not to fall. This is hard enough on him, and _he’s_ not dying, nor doomed for all eternity if he does. “It’s just that little bit further. Cas says he can already see Jena waiting for us at the end. Just take a few breaths and when you’re ready we’ll get there.”

Sam needs a while, but eventually he nods, shakily. Then he needs some more time before he stands up and turns around, and while Dean can’t see his face he can see his desperation in the tightening on his fingers around the rock.

Dean leaves his torch where he stuck it between two rocks and gives his brother a hand, guiding him with his arms, as far as he can without falling himself, and then it’s just a few terrible seconds before Cas’ hand reaches from the other side and he pulls Sam to safety, once again.

Dean hands over the torch and follows. It’s not even that hard. He needs all of thirty seconds.

But even for him it is getting harder as this strength is used up.

As expected, Jena is not waiting for them at the end of the difficult part. Or maybe she is, but if so, she’s well out of sight. She must have turned a corner at some point for Dean sees no glimmer of torchlight anywhere ahead. Either that, or she fell – something he very much doubts.

Sam needs another break now, and yet another after the next difficult bit. There’s a long passage eventually – one where neither Cas nor Dean can help him, and Dean sees Cas cling to the rope, keeping it as short as possible (keeping the fall as short as possible) and at some point Sam slips and Dean’s heart stops. But Sam keeps hanging on (because that is what Sam does) and finds his footing again and when Dean has followed after him he can finally see Jena, standing in the mouth of a tunnel with her torch in her hand, marking their goal.

Sammy still needs breaks, much more frequently so. Even on the easier last bit he has to stop every few steps, but now he has a goal before his eyes he doesn’t linger long but drags himself onwards, no matter how much it hurts.

Once they reach the end, can finally sink down and _breathe_ , Dean feels just how much this part of the way took out of him. The tension that came with the worry for his brother drains out of him, leaving him feeling nothing but pure, physical exhaustion for a blessed minute or two.

It’s Sam’s coughs that pull him out of it in the end, and Jena’s voice telling them that they still have a long way to go.

 

-

 

They might have a long way to go, but for now they only go a little bit further. Just until they find a nice spot that doesn’t offer any risk of anyone rolling into an abyss in their sleep. Jena says it’s only another four hours or so until they reach the other side and that the worst is over, but it’s obvious that Sam won’t make another four hours, not today. Not even on demon blood. He basically collapses the moment they stop and once Dean and Cas made a comfortable nest for him out of their blankets they basically have to roll him onto it because Sam’s not moving anywhere on his own anytime soon.

He’s going to be so sore when he wakes up. Hell, _Dean_ is going to be sore.

They eat, and when they are done, the bag with their supplies has considerably shrunk in size. There’s just enough left for maybe another day, two at best. They need to find something to hunt and eat as soon as possible once they emerge on the other side, and Dean doesn’t have any idea what it’s going to be like there. (On the side of the mountain they already saw there hadn’t been any living thing since they passed the tree line.)

Of course they are going to lose more time sitting here waiting for Sam to wake up – time to get hungry again. For once, Jena does not leave to come back with food, though Dean doesn’t know why, since it would be really helpful right now. Maybe she’s scared they will wander off and get lost around here, in the dark. It frightens Dean sometimes how much they depend on her. In the light of the one torch they left burning, he can make out three openings ahead of them and only Jena knows which one will get them to the exit.

What also worries Dean is how quiet Jena has been ever since they entered the caves. Okay, so she hasn’t been all that talkative before, but that was mainly because she was usually walking ahead, out of their general rage of conversation. Now they are all sitting together and she watches the darkness opening up around them and doesn’t speak.

“Can you see anything in the dark?” Dean eventually asks, because somehow, he always assumed angels could.

“I can see everything,” she tells him.

“Why are you carrying a torch, then?”

“So you can see me.”

That makes sense. If they had lost sight of their guide in here, Dean is pretty convinced that it would have been hard not to panic.

For him, at least. Maybe less so for Sam because Sam is a fucking champ.

Which forces Dean to wonder. Sam gave up there on that path. He didn’t see the end of the way and capitulated in the face of obstacles he was sure he couldn’t overcome. And that’s something that Dean doesn’t understand, because for decades Sam has been facing much worse, so much worse with no end in sight and he never gave up. He always kept going, no matter how hard it was. Never let go.

Understanding comes eventually, and when it does, it both crushes Dean and fills him with unexpected warmth: Sam allowed himself to give up here and now because he knew that Dean would not let him.

It’s pure instinct, now, that makes him run his hand through his brother’s hair, a primal need to be close to him. Sam turns ever so slightly into his touch but sleeps on, dead to the world. In the light of the torch Dean can just barely, make out the scars on his face and he runs his fingers over them, barely touching, hovering over the one the demon caressed as if it fucking belonged to him.

“Did he rape him?” he hears himself asking without making any conscious decision to use his voice.

At least his subconscious had the sense to speak quietly so he doesn’t wake Sam with this question about something Dean’s brother very certainly doesn’t want to think about.

“Who?” Cas asks, and Dean hates that that is even a question.

“The demon who attacked us.”

“Yes.” Such a simple answer, and Cas’ voice doesn’t even falter when he gives it. And then he has to go on and clarify, “At least I think so. I only came when it was mostly over. There were five of them and I do not know if this one had his turn.”

“How can you say it like that?” Dean whispers, fighting sudden tears and the almost irresistible urge to take Sam in his arms and keep him close to protect him from everything and everyone. It would wake him, though, and it wouldn’t do anything because everything already happened and the Sam it happened to is far out of Dean’s reach.

“I can, because it happened,” Castiel whispers back. His tone is matter-of-fact, but he’s whispering as well, just as unwilling to wake the boy sleeping between them. “I tried to protect him but I could not always succeed. I killed those who hurt him whenever I could but I was often too late. Denying it will not make it so it did not happen and it will not help Sam at all, only yourself. You need to know and accept that almost every demon who ever got his hands on Sam has tortured him in any way they could think of. It is what they do, you know that. Some humans have sexually assaulted him as well. And one angel.”

Jena’s laugh takes them both by surprise. It’s a harsh, ugly sound that makes Sam jerk in his sleep. Dean’s hand automatically runs through his hair in a soothing gesture and Sam calms down again even as his big brother glares as the archangel who has turned around to regard them with something like a sneer on her face.

“You really believe that?” she asks. Dean feels the urge rise up inside him to go over and punch her before she can say any more. Before she can tell them that no matter what he made himself believe, it really wasn’t Michael who hurt Sam that day, it was Dean and only him. But she says, “ _One_ angel? After all you have seen them do to you, to Sam, and the entire human race, how can you be so naïve, little brother?”

“What would you know about it?” Cas snaps. “You weren’t there!”

“But I know my brothers.”

“So do I. They have many, many faults, but they would not degrade themselves so without a proper motive, or what they believe to be such. They are too full of themselves.” The expression sounds odd, coming out of his mouth, but Dean notes it only subconsciously. He wants to cover Sam’s ears so he can’t hear any of this, but that would only wake him up.

“They were never above torture. You know that as well as I do,” Jena insists. “Rape is but a form of torture, and they all had their motives. Michael wanted to deceive you and prove a point, Raphael wanted to impress Michael. Hamael did it because he wanted to teach Sam what he is worth in the eyes of Heaven, Dumah did it because Hamael had done it. Essyel and Mural raped Sam because they were ordered to do so. Rochiel-”

“You’re making that up.” Cas’ own hand has found its way to Sam’s arm, right beside Dean’s. He’s glaring, looking defensive, and Dean hopes so much that he is right.

“Believe me, Cas,” Jena says, her voice almost gentle. “When Sam was banned from Heaven and could only go to Hell, it didn’t make his situation that much worse. And that one time he was taken by Raphael and his soldiers and you found him dead without many obvious external wounds? That wasn’t because those had already been healed, it was because they had quite literally fucked him to death.”

Cas shakes his head, as if denying it could make it go away. Doing just want he told Dean to avoid. Dean can’t call him out on his hypocrisy, though, because he is too busy hating Jena right now. “And where were _you_?” he snarls.

She regards him coolly. “I never touched him.”

“Yeah, and you did nothing to help either.”

“I wasn’t around. I did my best not to get involved in their business. The way they behaved did little to make me want to get back in touch with my family, and in case you hadn’t noticed, I’m a bit of an outlaw now. I have my eyes and ears in Heaven, but most of my brothers think me a traitor. Back then, they would have detained me if they’d gotten their hands on me, forced me to join their fight. Now they might even kill me for what I’m doing for you.”

“I’m close to tears,” Dean spits. “They would have detained you? Wow, that’s really shocking in the face of them raping my brother all through the afterlife. You’re an archangel! You can’t tell me your word has no weight with the foot soldiers. If nothing else, you could have smited their asses and pulled Sammy out of there, given him back to Cas.”

“That’s still my family you’re talking about,” Jena reminds him, her voice suddenly icy. “Would you have beheaded your little brother for pulling the wings off an insect?”

It’s nice to know that this is what she thinks of them. Dean knows she’s so much more powerful than them, that the angels live forever and the human lifespan is nothing to them, the loss of such few years barely notable. But he doesn’t know how he can trust her, rely on her when she regards them like this and thinks their pain doesn’t matter.

“Sam never pulled the wings off any insects,” he mutters, and Jena shrugs.

“Maybe that is his problem.”

 

-

 

They have to wait and it’s still a long way to go, so Dean should sleep, should make use of the opportunity and get all the rest he can because there’s no telling when he’ll next get the chance. But he just lies there in the dark and can’t stop thinking, listing to his brother’s rough breathing all the time.

He falls asleep for minutes, and when he wakes up it’s to Cas pulling Sam upright just a little, holding a palm smeared with demon blood to Sam’s face. It’s to Sam licking the blood of an angel’s gracious hand like a fucking dog.

When they get ready to leave, Dean pulls Sam up and into his arms, engulfing him in a hug with his face buried in Sam’s hair.

“What’s this about?” Sam asks even as he returns the pressure of his brother’s arms.

“Nothing,” Dean replies. “Nothing. Just let me hold you.”

 

-

 

They take the left of the three tunnels, and then the right one of the next two, then they turn left at a junction and wander through a hall made of stone and then they take another turn and another and then Dean doesn’t pay attention anymore. Too busy thinking about Sam to watch Sam and suddenly he’s alone. With an unexpected jolt of fear he looks up and finds no one else in the light of the torch. No light ahead of him. He was the last in line, and at some point the others must have turned left and he right, or the other way round, and it can’t have been more than a few seconds ago. It can’t.

“Hey!” he calls, and his echo answers.

Hastily, he walks back the way he came, finds a tunnel branching to the left and enters. There’s no one waiting for him, just darkness stretching out endlessly. “Hey!” he calls again. “Sam! Cas! _Sammy!_ ”

There’s nothing. He hurries along the tunnel but there’s another junction and he doesn’t know which way the others took. How far could they have walked before they noticed he was gone? Can they really be out of earshot?

Are they just as lost as him? Is Sammy running around, scared, alone in the dark?

Dean’s torch is dying. He has to find them, now, and the rising panic won’t help him. He has to calm down. He has to _think_!

There’s no point in running around aimlessly; too much of a risk of picking the wrong tunnel and getting even more lost. He should just wait where he is; eventually they will come back for him. He just took the wrong turn and they will notice, and Jena will make sarcastic remarks while Cas will frown in disapproval and Sam will be pale and relieved because he was worried, was flipping out inside because they didn’t know where Dean was and if he was okay. Because that’s how Sam and Dean react to losing sight of each other, and great job, Dean, for not paying attention and scaring Sammy like that. Even more stress for his little brother, what an awesome job he’s done again.

For a few seconds, Dean focuses on being angry at himself since that is a lot easier to bear than being scared and facing the knowledge that he’s going to die in here if they don’t find him. Then he realizes that his torch isn’t going to live much longer and the panic comes knocking again. Which is ridiculous because he’s been through so much, has faced so much and kind of ended the world, so he shouldn’t be this scared of being lost and alone in the dark, so fucking far away from any source of light. But the situation strikes something primal inside him and there’s a note of fear in his voice when he yells for the others once again.

There’s no reply. How far ahead do they have to be for them not to hear him? Do they even stand a chance of finding him in here? How many turns did they take? Can Jena make him out with her archangel powers when other angels cannot?

Will she bother? Of course she will, if only to stay on Sam’s good side. What if they are splitting up looking for him and Sam gets lost? They wouldn’t be that stupid, would they?

What if Sam wandered off looking for him on his own?

Sitting still is impossible. Dean doesn’t even know if the others passed this way at all. The best thing would be going back to the last point he remembers being with them for sure, so he moves backwards and backwards, but there are two tunnels and he’s sure they came out of the right one (the wall to the left had been closer then, right?) but then he’s not sure if they have ever been here at all. There was a large rock in the shape of a nose that attracted his attention, but no matter how far he runs back, he can’t find it. Maybe he did take the wrong tunnel. So he walks back, but now he can’t find the junction he just passed and his light keeps getting weaker and weaker and the story of Sammy getting lost in the mirror maze doesn’t seem so funny anymore.

He calls again and was that an answer? Dean stops, listens, but doesn’t hear anything over the echo of his own voice. He waits until it dies and calls again, but the echo being thrown back at him swallows everything. He feels like there is something hidden beneath it; someone calling at exactly the same time, there but invisible.

His heart is racing, and not with hope. He doesn’t call again.

 

-

 

His torch dies. In the darkness that follows, Dean hears his heartbeat thunder through the tunnels and caves.

Suddenly he is convinced that there is something moving in the darkness. He needs to be quiet, but if he is, the others will never find him. And it’s probably just his imagination. It happens, in total darkness, in an unfriendly environment. Even to hunters. Dean knows that better than anyone.

He takes a deep breath, wants to yell again, as loud as he can, when he hears a sound, like stone scraping on stone, somewhere far away.

And damn, as a hunter he knows better than anyone that there are _things_ in the dark.

So he doesn’t make a sound. He tries to find his way back to where he came, back to that big junction he found before, where anyone looking for him just _has_ to pass. Wants to feel his way along the wall, but his fingers in the darkness find nothing, no wall, even though it was right beside him. He walks a few steps, feeling around, all his senses focused on the dark and the emptiness, and was the tunnel this wide? He should have hit stone by now.

When he finally, finally touches the wall of solid rock, it’s the wrong angle. He’s not facing the direction he thought he was and now he doesn’t have any idea which way to turn. Where he came from, where he’s going.

The others won’t leave without him, would they? (He’s not even scared of dying. This is deeper than that.)

He should just sit down, take deep breaths, and wait for them.

A sound again, barely audible over his tense breathing and racing heart. It must be the others, looking for him. If he can hear the pebbles they send tumbling down, they have to be close enough to hear him call.

Only, he’s almost certain the sound comes from the wrong direction.

Just a stone falling, then. It happens. They disturbed the quiet of this place. It’ll settle again, when all lose pebbles have fallen.

It takes effort, but Dean manages to calm down. He can’t change anything about the situation he’s gotten himself in, and whining won’t help. Now he needs to stay calm, think, take the logical steps. He can almost hear his father’s voice as he slows his breathing, concentrates on the facts instead of his imagination and the deadly, looming What If. He can’t see. Moving about will only get him more lost. The others will be looking for him – logically he knows that, so he will focus on that knowledge. Jena has great chances of actually finding him, even if she can’t magically locate him. The others must be running low on light too, though, so maybe she left Cas and Sam and went looking on her own.

Or maybe they have to get more torches before they can even try to save him, which would mean they have to get out first and then come back. Last time he asked, not that long ago, Jena estimated another two hours to the exit, but if she goes on her own, she might be faster. Still Dean will have to settle for a long wait in the dark, and his stomach tries to clench at that, but he won’t let it. This is manageable.

He doesn’t like the thought of Jena leaving the others alone, but Cas can look after Sammy. He has done that so for so long. He won’t let anything happen to him. Dean has to rely on that, and he has to fucking accept it.

He waits for what seems like hours – but Dean is accustomed to tense situations and the tricks his mind plays on him. It’s probably been no more than ten minutes when he hears stones fall again, so much closer this time. And for one second he thinks he hears something like footsteps.

His heart leaps, but he can’t tell if it’s for hope or fear. He’s still convinced that the sounds are coming from the wrong direction, but his sense of direction is as lost as him and the others might have walked a detour looking for him. Someone is nearby, but he sees no light. They must be in another tunnel. If he doesn’t make a sound, they are going to miss him.

Another minute passes in silence and then he can hear it: footfalls, no doubt. Light, even. Not Sam, who’s limping and has trouble lifting his left foot all the way off the ground after a long walk. Not Jena either, though – her naked feet would never cause this much noise. It would explain the lack of light since she can see in the dark, but it’s not her. Must be Cas, then. But Cas is too human, needs light. (Doesn’t he?) So he’s coming down a different tunnel, and Dean can only hear him because the sound is carried far and around corners. He needs to call or his friend will miss him, and so he does.

There is no reply, except that the echo of his voice trails out with what sound like giggles. In a female voice that doesn’t sound like Jena at all.

 

-

 

One minute or an hour later, Dean is pressed against the wall, his knife in his hands and his heart hammering in his throat. He moved away from where he’s been waiting, the position he gave away with his call, but he kept pumping into things, kept stumbling on the uneven ground and he thinks he made too much noise; that she (it) must be able to find him. If he can hear her footsteps she can hear his.

Except he’s not hearing anything anymore. As soon as he stops for one second and listens, he hears only silence. And he thinks, desperately hopeful, Okay, there’s a hell of an echo in here and she can’t locate him, is running in the wrong direction, has followed the wrong tunnel.

Or she’s not after him but after the others (Sam) and figured that he’s not with them so she’s not wasting her time.

Which just makes him want to move faster to warn them, but he doesn’t even know where they _are_ and all that’s left for him to do is standing there, still and motionless, listening into the dark for anything, anything at all.

There’s nothing. And he takes another step forward, his feet feeling for the ground, making too much noise. Stops again, to listen. Nothing. Another step, another stop. A woman’s voice, right behind him, saying “Hello Dean,” and breath brushing the damp skin of his neck as she speaks.

 

-

 

Dean doesn’t even have time to make a sound before she lifts him up and throws him against the rocks as if he weighs nothing.

 

-

 

She’s over him in a second, her bony knees digging into the flesh of his thighs as she’s kneeling on him, her hands (long hands, broader than Jena’s) closing around his neck. Dean brings up his own hands, wraps them around thin wrists, but they don’t move because her strength isn’t human. But she’s not strangling him, not really. She’s playing, and she knows his name.

He doesn’t even know _what_ she is.

“Poor Dean,” she sing-songs. “Poor, poor child, all alone in the dark.” Suddenly her hands leave his neck, only to collide with his face a second later as she backhands him. “I’m close to tears!” she spits out.

“You’re fucking insane,” Dean gasps, his head reeling from the blow and from colliding with the rock earlier. He’s finally seeing something: colorful lights dancing before his eyes.

“An insane demon. Will you look at that! And there they say we are all insane, but _nooo_ , there are levels. You’d think it was an achievement to be considered insane by demon standards. Congratulations, asshole!” And, great, she really _is_ insane. And a demon.

“What the fuck are you talking about? What do you want?”

She just snorts. Stands and pulls Dean up along with her, and his legs won’t carry him even though they don’t hurt. He registers it unconsciously as she presses him against the wall of rock, a sharp edge digging painfully into his back. “It took me ages to find you but they knew I would. You’re my gift for leading them just like I was yours. I love symmetry.”

Dean still has no idea who she is, no fucking idea whatsoever. But she’s obviously pretty far gone so she might not know either. She might not know him at all and just babble. Might help if he could see her, but if she’s a demon it’s unlikely he’d recognize her face.

“Meg?” he tries, and she laughs, shrill and ugly. He imagines her throwing back her head and exposing her throat, and if he could see her and move, and if he had a demon-killing weapon…

“Meg’s gone, gone, gone,” she sing-songs. “That bitch who tried to sell us all out. Your precious little brother toasted her, didn’t you know? Little Sammy burned the life right out of her. We cheered.”

She’s not one of Lucifer’s, then. Doesn’t really narrow it down. “Who the fuck are you? Who were you leading? Who’s coming?”

“All of them.” She brings her face real close to his, draws the words out. “Aaall oooff theeeeemmm.”

“Yeah? I thought most of them are working for the other side?” Dean can’t not snarl back. He’s fucking terrified, for himself and for his brother – it’s an automatic reaction.

“If we found you, they will find you as well. But we found you first. _I_ found you first.”

“Far as I can tell, you only found me.” There’s no hope for him. No fucking hope. He’s going to die here, taken apart by this demonic nutcase, and Dean can only hope that she’ll be quick, in the end, and that she’ll be gone by the time Michael brings him back.

For the first time he hopes that the others are _not_ looking for him. He’d rather die of thirst a thousand times over while looking for the exit than have his brother run into the demons that have followed them.

“I don’t care for more,” she suddenly yells. “ _I_ was only looking for you. Where the others are, I don’t give a fuck! This is as far as my contract goes.”

“What contract?” Dean can’t quite follow. It’s either because of his ringing head or because she’s not making any fucking sense.

“I’ll take you apart, bit by bit,” she promises, her voice all calm again. “I’ll take my time, like you did with me. I’ll _experiment_. And when you are small enough to be carried comfortably, I might take you along and we’ll find the others and I’ll let you watch what they are doing to your brother before I rip out your eyes and eat them. But before that I want you all for my-” She stops, suddenly, as if a thought just came to her. “But that might not work because you’d be dead before then. People can die in the real world. Not like in Hell where the pain _just goes on forever._ ” She’s yelling again, and Dean’s stomach clenches, turns to ice.

“Who are you?” he whispers.

“I was your first,” she whispers back, into his ear. “I was the one Alastair gave to you as a gift, as a reward, as a toy. When he taught you to like it. And you liked it sooo much.” She’s rubbing against him now, pressing her body against his in a far too intimate way that makes his skin crawl and his frozen stomach turn. “You liked me so much that you would not let me go. Not even when I begged for mercy. Not even when I gave up and in and tried to make the same choice you made. You wouldn’t _let me go_!”

And Dean remembers her now. It’s like her words have opened a door in his mind to all the memories of Hell he usually keeps locked away somewhere out of reach just for the sake of survival. But he never truly forgot – and how could he forget _her_ , that vile creature Alastair gave to him when Dean first gave in? That chunk of meat on his very own rack. That thing that twitched and screamed.

His mind had still been reeling with the magnitude of his defeat after he had given in, when the thought of going through another session had been too much to bear (he could have made another one, and another, and another ten, or hundred, but it wouldn’t stop at a hundred, or a thousand, and his soul had submitted before the prospect of eternal agony) and he had given in with a whisper, barely a nod. He’d given in before, had agreed to torture and maim and become Alastair’s pupil rather than his toy, but he had never meant it. Had planned to take the knife offered to him and use it to fight his way out. They had always seen through it, had never let him go. Only when Dean said Yes that time and Alastair lifted him off the rack (so fucking gentle, like a father or a lover) did he realize that this time he was willing. This time he had no hope. (This time he was utterly and completely broken.)

Alastair took him by the hand that day, led him to another room that looked just like the one Dean had been tortured in but wasn’t, and there was a rack and a woman strapped to it, all naked and whole, yet untouched by the suffering of Hell but already so, so afraid. She was gagged, but her eyes were pleading, panicked; Dean remembers looking at her and knowing he could hurt her, even as he felt the final trace of his humanity flare up and scream.

And Alastair had whispered into his ear. Had told him who she was, this woman he had hand-picked just for him. This lady who looked so much younger than she had been (“Lived for ninety years, Dean. Such a long life and she didn’t deserve it.”), who had not made a deal but earned her stay in Hell through her deeds and the state of her soul.

Not a good person. Led a life of crime. Traded drugs and weapons in seedy backstreets, made money with organized sexual slavery. She shot six people in her life, two of them innocent. She had one beat to death, ran a girl over with her car when she thought the girl might have seen her committing a murder. She used those around her, gaining power and abusing it. When she was forty, she took the money she had made and disappeared. Lived out her days in another country with a new name, a fake past. A normal life without all the danger and the stress; just enjoying herself as a rich woman with many lovers and expensive toys, reaping the fruits of all her hard work. A safe life that ended with a stroke. She gave to charity.

Forty years of crime against fifty years of normalcy. Her life had a rough start. Ending up on the wrong side of the law was nearly inevitable. She left that life when she could.

But, Alastair had whispered in his ear. But she used to have a little brother. Six years younger, utterly dependant on her. And she didn’t take care of him. She took the most food for herself, left him scraps. She never let him go to school, let him smuggle drugs and dirty money instead. When times were hardest she avoided having to prostitute herself by pimping him out. He died in a gang fight when he was fifteen, and all his life until the end he had loved her because she was the only one he knew how to love. When he was gone, she considered it an inconvenience.

Alastair had chosen her with care, knowing it would make it so much easier for Dean to take the final step over to the rack and pick up the knife. Her eyes had been wide and panicked and they were the first thing he went for. When the tip of the blade first made contact, he felt elation.

“I remember you,” he hisses through clenched teeth, the old hatred flaring up. There’s not a trace of the guilt he used to feel all the time, all the time since he crawled out of his own grave. (Alastair had been so proud. He had rewarded Dean. Dean wanted to keep her. He had wanted to keep her for a long time.) “You tried to give in before I even started. So willing to hurt others for your own convenience. But no one gets off that lightly. That’s not _how Hell works_!”

“I know Hell better than you do, asshole!” she spits back. Strong fingers find their way into his hair and pull. “I know how it works. I did not deserve what you did to me, for so long! Even your master told you to let me go, said I was ready. But you just kept on going.”

“You deserved everything! There’s not a day I haven’t hated myself for what I did in Hell but for you, I don’t feel guilty. If I could, right now, I would pick up where we felt off!”

“I’ll rip you apart!” she screeches. “Then you’ll have time to overthink that again while _I_ ignore _your_ pleas for mercy!”

Dean doesn’t point out that her torturing him will hardly make him think of her any more kindly. He doesn’t actually have time to think anything at all before her hand clamps around his throat and squeezes, her nails digging into his flesh, reopening the cut from the other demon’s knife and going deeper. If he’s lucky he managed to anger her so much that she’ll lose control and accidentally kill him quickly.

Though she’ll probably stomp around on his corpse in blind rage so long that she’ll still be here when he comes back.

Dean can’t even finish the thought before she lets go of him all of a sudden and screams in a way he remembers from Hell. It’s a different voice, but that is her, no doubt. The exact same scream, so desperate and angry and agonized. And he has no idea what causes it, except she’s glowing in the dark now. Glowing from the inside, her bones visible under her skin, her open mouth and eyes full of white light, and Dean has to look away, his eyes unable to deal with the brightness after such a long time in darkness.

Her hands let go of his throat the same moment she stops screaming and the light dies.

For a seemingly endless moment, there’s only silence, before it is broken by a quiet, cracked voice saying, “Dean?”

“Sammy?” Dean tries to take a step forward, only to fall onto his knees and the burned out corpse before him. He tries to get up again, his legs not fully working, not supporting his weight. But they are moving, at least, so his spine can’t be broken, can it? Now the immediate danger is over he has time to worry about that, but yet again he’s distracted by Sam being somewhere in the darkness before him.

“Dean,” Sam says again and Dean can hear him stumbling closer. “Beware the corpse,” he calls, not wanting his little brother to fall over it and hurt himself. Then he realizes how silly that just sounded and has to fight the irrational urge to giggle.

His head is pounding and ringing and he begins to consider the possibility that he might just possibly have a concussion.

At least he manages to stumble away from the corpse before he falls again. A second later, someone is before him and then rough hands are feeling his head, wandering down his shoulders, checking for injuries. They find them; Dean winches when Sam brushes over a particularly sore spot on his shoulder blade. “Are you hurt?” he asks breathlessly.

“Dude.” Dean is still trying to get his thoughts straight. “Did you just gank a demon with your brain?”

“Side effect of the blood, remember?” Sam’s fingers return to Dean’s face, cradle it. “I did that a couple of times before.”

“Oh yeah?” Dean’s not really surprised, so he probably did know that. Finally, it comes to him. “This was what killing Lilith looked like?”

“And Alastair.”

“You killed Alastair?” Dean’s pretty sure he didn’tknow _that_.

“You didn’t know?”

“I thought that was Cas.”

“Okay.”

“Okay, what?” Dean’s own hands are feeling for Sam, travelling over too-warm skin and protruding bones.

“I’m okay with you thinking that. Sorry. I thought you knew.”

“No. It’s cool, though. I’m okay with it.” Back then, Dean probably wouldn’t have thought it was anything like oaky. Killing Alastair, any day. Doing it with Sammy’s brain, not so much. He wouldn’t be okay with it now but not being okay with it would make Sammy feel bad.

“I enjoyed it.” Sam’s voice is quiet, dull. He pulls on Dean’s shoulders to get him upright and Dean does his best to help. (Sam’s weak. Dean’s the one who should be helping _him_.) “For what he did to you.”

“Hey.” Dean’s standing now and his legs kindly carry him. But he has to lean heavily on his brother and it occurs to him that they are still lost in the dark. “Hey. How much did you hear?”

Sammy’s not answering. He’s leaning on Dean as heavily as Dean leans on him. Dean should check his face, see if his nose if bleeding again. Exercising his powers like this used to kill Sam even when he was strong and healthy. “I meant it,” he states. “I don’t regret what I did to her. She deserved it and I’d do it again.”

“It’s good, Dean.”

“I mean it. How did you even find me? Are the others around?”

“No idea. I was with Cas but I kind of lost him. Jena went to look for you but she was looking in the wrong direction.”

“How did you know?”

“I felt the demon.”

Of course he did. Dean sighs. They are walking, ever so slowly, and not bumping into terribly much with Sam leading the way. Freaky. “That why you run around in the dark?”

“I lost the torch when I fell earlier.”

“You happen to still have it? Maybe we can light it again.”

“Fell down a gap in the ground.”

Which, naturally, means that Sam almost fell down there as well. And then he continued walking in the dark. Dean doesn’t even want to think about it.

“How are we going to find Cas now?” For the moment, that’s the most pressing problem. If they don’t find the others or the way out, they are going to die here. And that sucked enough when Dean was alone, but for Sam it means Lucifer, and then the end of what is left of the world.

The demon spoke of others, so they’d better not yell for anyone. They are very, very screwed.

And yet, Dean is ridiculously – and guiltily – glad that Sam is with him now. He holds his brother a little closer, and together they stumble on through the dark.

 

-

 

It feels like an hour, but in the end it’s probably barely ten minutes before they see the shine of torchlight reflecting off the walls of stone before them. Both of them stand very still, barely breathing…

…until Sam starts coughing, loud and explosive. Dean winces, half in sympathy and half because this might have been the worst timing ever, but the two figures that come hurrying towards them are just Cas and Jena, the relief on their faces making them look like worried parents.

“That was the most useless action ever, Dean,” Jena states, destroying the moment. Cas, in the meantime, comes over to give Sam a hug that gives Dean an idea of how he was feeling when suddenly he lost sight of his weak and seemingly helpless friend.

Well. Helpless his ass.

In the light of the torch, Dean can finally make out Sam’s face: white as paper, bloodshot eyes, and an impressive bruise on his forehead. He looks slightly out of it, so Dean takes over the job of telling the others what happened. He warns them of the demons that are looking for them and finishes with, “Sam just toasted someone with his mind over there. Do you think anyone sensed that?”

“Unlikely.” It’s Cas who answers. “His powers are mostly invisible to angels. Otherwise Lucifer would have found him much more often, before.”

“Okay. Well. How about we go back there and bleed the bitch out so we don’t have to restrict Sam’s rations as much?” Because Sam looks like shit and a hit might help and Dean hates himself for thinking that way.

“No point. Sammy’s burned the demon right out of that body,” Jena destroys his idea. “Would make just as much sense as slurping your blood.” Dean is overcome with the unpleasant idea of inviting a demon into his body that they then can trap and move around with them as a living supply ready for the taking, and that’s really not a thought he wants to explore any further.

His head is still spinning and the torchlight hurts his eyes. “We need to get out of here, then” he hears himself say. “Who knows how close those demons are? Why didn’t you notice her, anyway?”

“I did. But only when she was very close, and even then I could not pinpoint her exact location. Not a good time for you to get lost, just saying. And not a good time for your useless brother to run away from Cas, by the way.” She glares at Sam, but Sam doesn’t give a fuck. He’s still kind of supporting Dean and also kind of leaning on Cas and they still have a long way to go. Only now, they also have demons on their asses.

“Do you think the demons are shielding themselves from detection?” Cas wonders, looking at the archangel. Jena makes a vague gesture that could mean just about anything.

“I would think so. But of course that would mean that they know there’s a full-powered angel with you.”

“Sam could find her.”

“Sam’s more in touch with their nature,” Jena reminds him dryly, and Dean can feel Sam flinch at her words. So much for being out of it. Just fantastic. Bitch.

That’s the end of the discussion, though. Jena hurries them along, more tense than Dean has seen her in days, and that doesn’t do anything to make him feel better. However, it’s probably not the reason why suddenly a wave of nausea washes over him and makes him puke on the ground before his feet.

They have no other choice but to take a break. Dean feels like shit and Sam more or less collapses on top of him. They are both breathing hard and Cas is surprisingly gentle when he checks Dean for injuries.

After it’s been established that yes, he does have a concussion and a cracked rib on top of it, Jena crouches down beside him and touches his forehead. The pain lessens considerably, though it doesn’t go away altogether. “I can’t use my powers to their full extend for this,” Jena explains afterwards. “But with Sam doing so well, I don’t need to save them for him, at least.”

Dean has different opinions about Sam doing well, but while he was distracted by being in pain, Cas fed Sammy some more blood and he’s looking a little more alive. He still needs some support on the last stretch of road before the exit – and Jena makes them all tie their belts together with rope so no one will get lost again. Like a frigging kindergarten, but Dean is hardly in a position to protest.

 

-

 

They lost a lot of time, and due to both Dean and Sam limping, they make progress slower than planned. The longed for daylight at the end of the tunnel never comes, even as movement of the air indicates an opening nearby. When they finally emerge, it happens suddenly, without warning, and in the middle of the night.

A cold wind is blowing in greeting of their little group. They are still high up and Dean doesn’t look forward to climbing all that way down. If it were daytime, the height would at least work to his advantage by giving him a good view on the land below and maybe figuring out where they are, but it’s dark and the view is utterly useless.

It seems idiotic to leave the protection of the cave they emerge from only to look for another one, but since they know they are bang followed by demons and the demons are most likely somewhere inside the tunnels, it actually makes sense.

The cave they settle in hardly deserves the name. The mouth is too wide, it’s not deep enough, but it’s better than nothing. Dean falls asleep almost immediately, having learned to trust the protection of the two angels watching over them even in situations like this.

Also, he’s really, really tired.

The sky is brightening when he closes his eyes and it’s broad daylight when he wakes up. Which of course in fact means that there’s dim twilight outside. But that’s fine – he’s still sporting a headache and anything more would have killed him.

He can’t have slept long; the others would not have allowed that given the danger they are in, but Sam is already awake, looking a little pale and bruised but none the worse for wear. If he can face the day and the climb down, Dean has no right to complain, so he doesn’t. He just groans a lot as he sits up, as he forces down a meager breakfast and as he washes off the dried blood from the cut on his neck as best he can without wasting too much water and changes into a less-dirty shirt.

The air is very dusky when they step out of the cave, not allowing for much of a view. Dean is still sure he can make out the remnants of a city in the valley below. They continue their way mostly in silence.

It’s not likely that the demons are directly after them since the mountain offers many ways to get lost and Dean knows they can’t find them by anything but conventional means. The demon who caught up with him in the cave was driven by determined insanity and apparently she didn’t give much of a fuck if anyone else profited from her pursuit. Dean imagines her following them through the dark like some kind of demented Gollum with tits and a slightly better vocabulary, but he’s worried by her indication that other demons used her as a bloodhound to find Sam.

So the only conversation they have all day if him asking Jena a dozen times if she can sense anyone following them, which she always denies. Dean really, really hopes the hypothetical demons got lost in the mountain and will be stuck there forever.

Except they can teleport, and all…

Of course, they still have the big bad archangel protecting them, which should give them an advantage, but then, the demons seem to know about the big bad archangel, which takes the advantage away.

In the end, though, nothing much has changed. They are on the run and trying not to attract attention.

The way down is easier than anticipated. There’s some sort of path between the rocks that leads all the way down to the edge of vegetation. For a while, Dean is pleasantly surprised, but what he thought was the hardest part, the path over rocks and lose earth, turns out to be the easiest in the end. The trees that hide them from view once they reach them also hid the mean passages of steep ground and loose rocks that they have to get across.

It’s kind of embarrassing, but Dean is relieved when Sam calls for a break. He’s not doing so great himself.

At dusk, they settle beside creek, fill up their bottles, wash. Dean, Cas and Sam sleep in a heap, keeping each other warm against the cold air. The strange warming of the air to almost bearable degrees that helped them on the other side doesn’t happen here. It’s just as cold as it was when Dean was attacked by wolves.

And it gets worse the next day. While the ground flattens and make walking easier, a strong wind picks up that hits them without mercy whenever a gab in the trees gives it a chance, and it picks up speed even more, developing into a full-fledged storm, when they leave the trees behind for good and wander unprotected, wrapped into blankets and closing their eyes to slits, walking nearly blindly. It hasn’t snowed here, and the earth is loose, blowing into their faces.

It also makes the view even worse. Somewhere in the middle between their starting point and absolutely nowhere, Sam collapses. There’s no warning. He’s walking a few steps before his brother one moment and lying on the ground the next, his blanket blowing in the wind. Dean’s heart stops, then races, and finding his brother with a pulse and breathing doesn’t make it slow down much.

They carry him through the storm for hours until Jena leads them into something that provides shelter; something that turns out to be a building. Dean doesn’t care what it is. They enter through an empty doorway and go deep into the room behind until the wind doesn’t reach them anymore, and there they set down Sam and Dean collapses beside him and immediately crawls all over his brother, checking his breathing once again.

And then he passes out himself. He doesn’t even notice until he wakes up again and is somewhere else.

A sense of déjà-vu washes over him, reminding him of the time he got sick and Cas carried him from one building to the next while he was out. In this case he fell asleep inside what seemed to be the only room of a small building that still had four intact walls and a roof and he wakes up in a room that’s a little larger, the walls without tears. The first thing he notices, though, is the silence: the sound of wind is still there, but it’s subdued, and the air doesn’t move even a little.

The reason is the glass in the window that somehow survived intact. Behind it, Dean sees only the sky, but something tells him that they are a good bit above the ground.

It’s still cold, but not as cold as before. He’s lying on a mattress. Somehow, this is among the last things he notices – amazing, considering how long it was since he last saw one. He sits up carefully, winces with the pain that shoots through his head, and gives the room a closer inspection: bare walls, a table in the corner, obviously recently moved there to make room if the traces on the floor are anything to go by. A couple of chairs and a sofa beneath the window. This was never a bedroom, and it doesn’t contain a bed. Just this mattress, moved here so he doesn’t have to lie on the floor.

There are even sheets, though they have seen better days. Dean can’t blame them – he’s seen better days, too. What he doesn’t see is anyone else. Cas isn’t there. Jena isn’t there. Most importantly, Sam isn’t there.

With the help of the wall, he manages to move himself upwards. The mattress becomes his best friend when everything turns black and it kindly breaks his fall.

 

-

 

The next time he wakes up, his head doesn’t hurt as badly. He’s still lying on the mattress, under the covers, arranged in a normal sleeping position, not in the heap in which he must have fallen, which means the others are, in fact, still around somewhere instead of moving on without him.

His eyelids are sticking together. He tries to rub them only to find that he can’t move because something heavy is lying on him. Something tells him, even before he is able to see, that he found his brother at least.

Sure enough, Sam is half-lying on top of him, crawling in with his sick brother just like his brother did with him. The headache isn’t quite bad enough to excuse the water in Dean’s eyes anymore, but Sam’s asleep and Dean doesn’t really give a fuck.

Sam shifts slightly, pulling himself even closer to Dean. His skin is overly warm when Dean brushes the bangs out of his face, but what else is new?

Carefully, carefully, Dean rolls away, leaving Sam to curl up in the warmth he left behind. He sits up and finds Cas, half-sitting on the couch and also deeply asleep. The whole thing has the air of a lazy afternoon. It’s almost absurd.

Dean doesn’t want to wake them, but he wishes there was someone around to tell him where they are. He also would like to know if there’s a bathroom around because he really, really needs one right now.

His legs are shaky as he stands up, but they carry him. The door of the room is open, revealing a short corridor behind it, with more open doors. One leads to a bathroom where Dean relieves himself. There’s no water, though. No surprise there.

Afterwards, he goes to inspect the rest of the place. There is a glass door leading to a stairwell, and an elevator without power. Dean doesn’t explore the other floors, though, unwilling to go too far from the others. There is a kitchen. A small office with bookshelves and a computer. And a bedroom, with a single bed, the covers unruly because Sam has slept in them before worry for his brother has driven him to sleep on Dean instead.

Ceilings and floors before every door and window are painted with devil’s traps and Enochian symbols.

In the end, Dean returns to the room with the couch and carefully sits down on the corner not occupied by Castiel. He finds their bags between couch and wall and reaches for one he knows contains food. He’s not hungry but very thirsty, hoping to find their water bottles still full. Cas wakes up while Dean rummages through the contents of the bag and blinks at him lazily.

“Where are we this time?” Dean keeps his voice to a whisper, careful not to wake his brother. Though Sam looks sick, he also hasn’t seen him sleep this peacefully in a long time.

“Some city.” Yeah, Dean didn’t really think it would be more specific than that. “This building is stable, we’re up far enough not to be easily spotted in the windows. There is furniture that is comfortable. This is not the worst place to wait.”

Of course, there is the other side of this: the place offers nowhere to run should they be discovered, and no fresh food and water should they run out of supplies. But it has beds. It has that going for it. “What are we waiting for?”

“Gabriel.”

Dean noticed her absence before, but assumed that she was simply out getting supplies. This sounds like something more long-term, though. “What’s she doing?”

“How are you feeling?” Cas asks almost at the same time so Dean can’t be sure he’s really trying to avoid the question.

“Where’s Jena?” he asks again. Cas sighs, defeated. So much for that.

“She’s gone.”

It doesn’t make sense. “But we’re waiting for her.”

“Yes. I hope she will come back.”

Dean still isn’t sure he understood. “Does that mean she _abandoned_ us?” That wasn’t very quiet. Sam shifts and Cas throws Dean a warning glare.

“No, she didn’t. She will come back, but it might take time. Maybe longer than we can wait. It’s not likely, so I didn’t mean to worry you.”

“Well, I’m worried! What’s she doing?”

“Working on a plan to defeat Lucifer.”

That shuts Dean up for a moment. They have been so busy running that he almost forgot that there was a point to it.

“What plan?”

“I don’t know. He refused to tell me. Possibly because he doesn’t know yet himself.”

“Or because he doesn’t think you’d approve,” Dean voices, almost inaudibly, what Cas mercifully didn’t. He looks over to where Sam is sleeping peacefully and Cas does the same and neither of them says a word.

 


	16. Chapter 16

So what happened, apparently, is that Dean collapsed from exhaustion combined with what was left of his concussion. Except it was less of a concussion and more of a cracked skull. Jena fixed that but not completely, so Dean’s body, stressed and undernourished and tired, eventually refused to go any further.

As for Sam, this is basically the normal setting for him. The demon blood keeps him from starving and gives him strength, but that strength isn’t his own. It only covers his weakness, doesn’t erase it. Little is needed to remind Sam’s body that it is ill and broken.

Dean feels a lot better now, though far from perfect. But the long rest did him good, as does not having to walk for miles and miles and miles every day. The food helps, too: as it turns out, Jena didn’t leave them to starve but left them quite a lot of cans, dried meat, as well as the typical small, crippled-looking fruits and vegetables. The best is the water, though: there’s a whole basin one floor below and for the first time in ages Dean gets to really clean himself. So do the others. He only notices how much they all stank when they don’t anymore.

There’s also a whole bottle of demon blood waiting for Sam. He still holds back because they don’t know how long it will be before they find the next one to bleed out, but at least he doesn’t have to torture himself anymore by waiting too long.

It doesn’t escape Dean’s notice, though, that the longer Sam is back to using, the more he needs to still the craving. He still holds back, which maybe explains why he’s not really getting well, physically and mentally.

Or maybe the damage is simply too great.

“Where did we get the blood?” Dean asks Cas at the end of their first day, and Cas just shrugs and says, “Gabriel brought it.”

“Of course he did.”

They are sitting at the table in the last light of day, playing cards. Soon it’ll be too dark for that since they don’t dare to make any kind of light in here. There are curtains in the bedroom that they pulled closed, but even so the risk is too high. This is only a good place to be as long as no one knows they are here.

Dean wishes he knew what Jena was up to.

He takes another sip from his glass of water. They don’t really have anything else to drink. Dean would love alcohol but alcohol makes people drunk and drunk people are careless, so he gets why there isn’t any. They can’t make coffee or tea because they can’t heat it up and every juice in the world has long since expired.

Sam is sitting at the other end of the table. He’s not playing with them, claiming he lacks the focus for poker right now. Instead, he’s doodling something on a piece of paper with a pen he found in a drawer, along with countless other pens , most of which don’t work anymore. Right now, his hand is mostly moving sluggishly over the paper and his eyes are struggling to remain open.

“Sam,” Dean says sternly. “If you don’t go to sleep now, I’m gonna carry you to bed and sing you a fucking lullaby.”

Sam blinks at him as if he was considering taking him up on the offer, and Dean is already making a list of songs in his mind that would greatly annoy his brother. But either Sam’s not really willing to take the risk or he accepts that it’s getting too fucking dark to keep writing, or drawing, or whatever it is he does, because he gets up and limps out of the room.

Dean is pleasantly surprised, since he half-expected Sam to go to sleep on the mattress on the floor of this room instead of the nice, comfy bed he has in the other room. His satisfaction turns to irritation when Sam doesn’t turn towards the bedroom but wanders down the hall.

“Where the hell is he going?” Dean asks, the game forgotten. Apparently Sam is so tired that he needs help remembering where his bed is. It’s possibly the last bed he will ever sleep in (and there is a happy thought, just keep going, Dean) and he should fucking appreciate it.

Cas just shrugs. “Brushing his teeth, I would think.”

Dean just stares at him because it makes so much sense. Of course Sam would. The boy has frigging _standards_ , after all.

Five minutes later Sam comes limping back, lets himself fall onto the mattress with something like a pained yelp and buries his face in the pillow.

 

-

 

Dean, still not entirely fit, falls asleep not long after that. He does so sitting at the table, only realizing what happened when he wakes up with kinks in his neck and feeling the return of his headache. Just great. Sam isn’t the only one who might never be offered this much comfort again, so he should really make use of it.

According to Cas, they will be able to stay for about a week before they have to move on in order to evade detection. They have enough food here that they don’t, for once, have to ration it. If by the end of their week there’s anything more left than fits into their bags, they won’t be able to take it with them, so there’s no point in not filling themselves up.

Dean hasn’t been this sated in ages. He would have eaten even more if he wasn’t still feeling a little crappy. Sleeping at the table did not help.

Cas is nowhere to be seen. Dean considers going over to the bedroom to sleep in the bed, leave Sammy his space – but Sammy wouldn’t have opted to sleep here if he didn’t want to be near the others, so Dean just slips under the covers beside his brother and closes his eyes. This is becoming a habit.

There are worse.

The next morning Sam wakes before him. Dean opens his eyes to a hiss of pain as Sam tries to get up and his crippled legs struggle to push up his weight.

“Did I tell you recently that you’re a moron?” Dean mutters sleepily. He rolls off the bed, yawns, stretches, and finally offers his idiot of a little brother a hand so he can pull him to his feet. Sam, ruffled and unshaven, glares at him and shuffles off.

Little brothers. Seriously.

Dean’s sitting at the breakfast table when Sam comes back, almost an hour later. He’s accompanied by Castiel and both of them are clean shaven, so they probably had a bonding moment in the bathroom over razor blades or something. Dean had a bonding moment with some slices of fruit, a few slices of smoked deer and a can of possibly-cat-food. All things considered, this is one of their better mornings.

“You know, there’s a reason why I got the mattress on the floor and you got the nice comfy bed,” Dean says with his mouth full of stuff. He swallows so Sammy can understand him better and maybe make sense of his words. “And that not just because the bed is nice and comfy, but also because it’s higher off the ground so it’s easier for you to get up and down. I know this is hard to understand, but it will make your life easier. So how about you try it next time?”

Sam doesn’t answer, just glares at him in passing. He flops onto the chair, looking out of the window. His hair is wet and hanging down onto his shoulders and his eyes are bloodshot. Bad night, Dean gathers. He reaches out to touch Sam’s forehead and finds it no less warm than he’s used to, but also no more.

“Nightmares?” he asks, suddenly worried. Not that Sam doesn’t constantly have nightmares, it’s just that Dean didn’t notice him having any last night, and that’s what concerns him.

Sam makes a vague gesture that Dean interprets as ‘Yeah, horrible ones, but not really worth mentioning.’ The usual, then. Probably Lucifer torturing him in his dreams. Or just memories of Lucifer torturing him in his dreams, or in Hell, or in person. He or his demons. Or the other demons. Or the angels. Or other humans.

It’s nice to know there has been variety in his brother’s life.

It’s not fair that they finally get some comfort and the illusion of safety and Sam still has no chance to get proper rest.

Cas sits down opposite Dean and reaches for the bowl of fruits in the middle of the table. Dean’s not even sure what it’s supposed to be. Pears, maybe. Crippled little pears that learned to live without sun. They are very watery anyways. Dean thinks about squeezing them out and creating fruit-juice, see if Sam can drink that and keep it down.

He just can’t imagine demon blood tasting all that good. Though for Sam, the taste is probably the last thing that matters.

Dean’s brother has his own breakfast: a sip from one of the re-filled flask, and Dean notices his hands trembling, can only imagine how much Sam wants to drink all of it, all at once.

There’s enough right now. Gonna last them weeks, but Sam’s careful. “I’ll need more than a little gulp if we get attacked and I need my powers,” he just said when Dean pointed that out to him the day before.

Now he pushes the bottle away with jerky movements. Dean does him the favor of taking it out of reach.

Outside, it’s begun to snow. Fat white flakes are falling against the windows, melt there and slowly slide down to pile at the bottom until the pile gets too heavy and falls down the side of the building. If this keeps up, if it gets just a little colder, they won’t be able to look out of the window anymore in a day or two.

Beneath them, a city Dean can’t identify lies still and dead, mostly rubble, though some parts look almost intact from up here – including some other buildings as high as the one they are in, standing like monuments in a sea of debris. Dean wonders if there is anyone living in the intact houses but no matter how long he looks out of the window, he never sees any movement.

The day passes without anything that deserves mention. For the most part, Dean is happy to sit or lie around, have food enough to not be hungry and not having to walk anywhere. He can’t fight the tension, though, that comes with not knowing if there is anyone already looking for them in the area. The place feels too exposed.

Perhaps Jena found the demons that were following them and turned them to ash. In that case it would have been nice if she had dropped them a note.

Cas does a lot of sleeping, showing how exhausted even he has been. When he’s not sleeping, he does a lot of sitting around, meditating or daydreaming or whatever it is he does.

Sam reads. There are books here, and they don’t look particularly exciting to Dean, but Sam devours them like a man who hasn’t read anything in decades. There is stuff on economy that even Sam won’t touch (What for?) and stuff on history that he loses himself in though it probably doesn’t tell him anything new. A few works of fiction is there as well – mindless romance crap, mostly, and some detective novels that, upon closer observation, turn out to belong to Arthur Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes series. Dean’s pretty sure Sam’s read them before, but it’s not like he has a lot of alternatives to choose from.

So Sam reads – mostly on the couch, or at the table until his bones hurt too much to keep sitting on the hard chair. If he’s not reading, he’s dozing. If he’s not reading or dozing, he doodles away in his little notebook that usually disappears somewhere when he’s not using it.

He has two nightmares that Dean notices and wakes him from, another one he can’t wake him from that might have been Lucifer in person. He drinks about one sip of demon blood a day, claiming he doesn’t need more to get by if there’s no exertion.

He looks like he’d really want more. On the third day he limps up and down the corridor restlessly, and nothing in the world could convince Dean that he’s not fighting the craving.

At night, when the light disappears and no more doodling or reading is possible, Sam agrees to go to bed and not just nap wherever he happens to be at the time. Dean even manages to make him sleep in the real bed by sleeping there as well. It’s not hard; after all, it’s cold, and they have spent the last several weeks basically sleeping on top of each other anyway.

It’s at night that Cas finally stops with the sleeping. Instead, he sits around and does his meditation thing again while staring out of the window. Dean isn’t exactly surprised when he realizes that their friend is keeping watch.

If Cas weren’t doing it, he would.

Sam is a cuddly, fever-warm ball against him. Dean hardly finds any sleep because Sam keeps twitching. Just before dawn, Dean finally drifts off. Just after dawn, he is woken by Sam kicking him in his sleep, whimpering. Dean shakes him until he is half awake and lets him sink back under, then he carefully crawls away to visit the bathroom downstairs and crawls back in. He sleeps until midday.

The next day, Sam has a splitting headache and stays in bed until evening. Cas feeds him – the drops on the palm method, as if he didn’t trust Sam to hold back. Or maybe he just doesn’t want to torture him with the possibility of more.

A sleepless night follows the day in bed. Dean dozes off eventually, on the mattress again since Sam and Cas are both sitting on the couch, Cas sitting half-sprawled over the sidearm, Sam kneeling on the seat with his arms hanging over the back, looking out of the window. It stopped snowing the day before, starts again that night. The snowflakes are almost glowing in the dark.

Dean hears them talking quietly as he falls asleep.

 

-

 

At some point that night, he thinks he might be hearing Sam laugh; a soft, quiet sound that drifts through his dreams and makes them better.

 

-

 

When Dean wakes up, Sam is still awake. He’s reading in the weak morning light falling in through the window, filtered by dust and snow. Between turning the pages, he yawns, and when he blinks, his eyes stay closed a little too long each time.

It’s obvious that he’s exhausted and needs sleep. That he doesn’t try means the nightmares are extraordinarily bad.

But it’s not that, Sam claims when Dean tells him to get some rest. “I’m tired, but I can’t sleep,” he admits. “Can’t stop thinking. I just need something to take my mind off things.” And he’s nodding towards his book in explanation, but that one’s not helping if Sam can’t focus on the words anymore. So Dean takes matters into his own hand like the good big brother that he is. He leads Sam into the bedroom by the arm, and Sam follows willingly. He’s wearing a shirt and sweatpants from the pile of clothes Jena left them, both too wide and hanging off him like any shirt did when he was smaller and wearing the clothes Dean had grown out of and Sam not quite yet grown into. He also keeps rubbing his eyes, which doesn’t help erase the impression that Dean is leading a five-year-old by the hand.

The bedroom answers the question of where Cas has gone. Their friend is sitting on the foot of the bed, knees drawn up, reading one of the books on economics with a slight frown on his face. He still does things that make no sense, and somehow that’s nice to know.

He looks up when Dean and Sam come in but doesn’t move, and Dean doesn’t pay attention to him beyond acknowledging his presence with a nod. The bed is broad and Sam easily fits in beside him, especially since he curls up so his feet are not even in the vicinity of Castiel’s ass.

In his too-wide clothes and with the ruffled hair, Sammy really does look like a child. “C’mon, let me tuck you in, baby brother,” Dean teases and Sam very maturely sticks out his tongue and smiles a little.

“I don’t think this is gonna do the trick, mom,” he says, daring to voice doubt with Dean’s brilliant plan.

“You have no idea what I’m planning, sweetheart,” Dean coos.

“Tuck me in and make me sleep? Read me a story, perhaps?”

“Sorry, baby. There are no books around here that are appropriate for your age – though I bet I could put you to sleep with the thing Cas is currently reading.”

“Yeah, if you let it fall on my head,” Sam notes drily. He yawns again and pushes himself up on his elbow. “Look, this isn’t going to work. I just need to wait until I fall over,” he says, even as he shakes his head to clear it.

“You stay down,” Dean orders and pushes him back onto the pillow. He grabs the blanket and tugs it around his brother. “Looking at you makes me tired, so I’m doing this for myself and you will fucking help me, understood?”

Sam rolls his eyes, makes a face, and flops down. He obediently closes his eyes and shifts, and after a minute he shifts again and Dean can see his eyes move beneath his eyelids in a way that has nothing to do with REM sleep.

At least he has the sense of not opening his eyes again, even as he rolls around to lie on his back, a half-irritated, half-defeated expression ever so faintly visible on his face. Not being able to sleep has to suck. Dean’s gone through a few sleepless nights in his life, so he can sympathize – even though it never happened when he was that exhausted and had that little time to recover.

It makes Dean restless just watching him. He reaches out and places a hand over Sam’s eyes, saying “Shh.”

Sam immediately seems to become calmer so Dean leaves his hand there for a long moment, and when he moves it, it’s only to stroke his brother’s long, soft hair. And he keeps stroking it, and he starts humming “Stairway to Heaven” under his breath before he even realizes what he’s doing.

While his eyes remain close, the hint of a smile plays around Sam’s lips, just for a second. Dean doesn’t stop. Instead, his voice picks up strength and he lets the soft tune reverberate through the room.

It’ a long song. By the time he’s done, Sam’s breathing is deep and calm and he doesn’t move when Dean carefully gets off the bed.

The glare he sends Cas is a precaution: if the former angel feels like giving him funny looks for humming his brother to sleep then he may be burned to ashes with the power of Dean’s eyes. However, Cas isn’t giving him funny looks. Cas’ head has sunk to his chest, his bangs are hanging before his eyes, and he’s snoring softly.

Shaking his head to himself, Dean wanders over to the desk on the other side of the small room, sits down on the chair in front of it and looks out of the window for any kind of movement disturbing the cover of snow.

 

-

 

A hand on his shoulder brings Dean back to awareness and he opens his eyes to darkness. For a moment, panic comes over him, before he realizes that it’s Cas (just Cas) shaking him awake. Dean can just about make out his face as his eyes grow accustomed to the dark.

“Sam’s still sleeping,” his friend says quietly.

If that’s the most important thing to mention (Sam’s asleep, be quiet), Dean can’t have missed anything dramatic when he shamefully fell asleep on his watch. Now Cas quietly shuffles off, either for food, or the bathroom, or the other window, and Dean stretches his aching limps, rolls his neck, and decides to get some proper sleep if he can. Sam curls against him when he slips under the covers and Dean wraps an arm around him and closes his eyes. He falls asleep, listening to the darkness.

 

-

 

The next day he wakes with Sam’s arm draped over his chest and Sam’s face buried in the crook of his neck. The last time someone snuggled against Dean in a similar way, they’d had sex before, and her hair had smelled of flowery perfume mixed with the cigarette smoke that filled the bar she had worked in.

Now that girl is as dead as everyone else Dean ever slept with and he really, really can’t afford to wonder if it was one of Michael’s city-leveling blows that killed her, or the hunger and epidemics that followed, or if a demon got her. Instead he concentrates on his brother’s weight, warm and alive, against him, and on the fact that his fever is down.

The next things Dean notes are connected to his state of being hungry and the fact that he has morning wood. Normal enough, especially with a full bladder, but not something he wants his little brother to wake up to, so he carefully slips away and to the bathroom to take care of it.

When he’s done, he checks on Sam again, finds him curled up and stirring softly. He’s going to wake up soon, but Dean won’t disturb him before he has to. He goes to find Cas at the table in the other room and feels unexpected warmth running through him when he sees that his friend has prepared breakfast for him. There’s even fruit juice waiting on the table.

“Sam’s better,” he says as he sits down. Castiel nods.

“Good.”

“How much longer until we have to leave? What do you think?”

“Two days, three at best.”

“You think Jena will be back by then?”

“I can’t tell.” Cas reaches over and snatches a handful of berries. “Either she’ll be back, or she won’t. We can’t wait for too long.”

“Let’s hope Sam’ll be up to it.”

“He’ll have to be.”

Dean has heard those words far too often lately. Sam has to be strong. Sam has to survive. Sam has to walk fifty miles through the frozen wilderness because there’s just no alternative.

The notebook Sam likes to write in is lying on the table beside Dean and he absentmindedly fondles the pages. “Provided there’s a way to stop Satan,” he says. “And provided you make it out alive, what are you going to do then, when it’s over?”

“I never thought about that.” Which probably means he doesn’t expect to survive, or that killing Satan is even possible. Cas tilts his head and looks at Dean. “What will _you_ do?”

“I’ll stay with Sammy.”

Cas doesn’t bother to point out that Sam’s chances of survival are even worse than anyone else’s. He just nods.

“Hey, Cas.” Dean clears his throat. “I’m sorry.”

Cas looks at him unblinkingly. “Me too.”

“I mean it. And, uh, thank you. For taking care of Sammy.”

“Sam is my friend.”

 _‘Yeah, and he’s my brother, but that didn’t stop me from royally fucking him over,’_ Dean thinks. But he just nods and finishes his breakfast. The juice is a little bitter, but still incredible after such a long time of only drinking water. Dean identifies the taste as apple.

Cas probably pressed them out himself, at some point in the night when the others were sleeping. “Sam would love this,” Dean muses and tries not to let it make him sad.

He flips open the journal and leaves through the pages. Sam usually keeps with him when he is awake and maybe he doesn’t want Dean seeing it, but Cas does nothing to stop him.

There’s no reason to, either, because the notebook is full of symbols that don’t make sense to Dean. He recognizes the Enochian, though. At some points it’s barely legible, the symbols slurred or drawn across each other when the light was fading or Sam go too tired to write clearly. Not that it matters to Dean. He’s the only one here who can’t read it, which means that he is the only one Sam doesn’t want to have insight in his scribbling.

So it comes as a surprise when Cas says, “It’s for you.”

“What does it say?” Dean doesn’t for one moment believe that Cas didn’t read Sam’s diary while he was asleep.

“I don’t think he wants me to tell you.” The ‘yet’ remains unspoken.

It looks like Sam is pretty convinced of both Dean’s and Cas’ survival. Dean closes the notebook and shoves it away, trying not to think of his brother preparing for his final showdown.

 

-

 

Just after noon, Sam comes limping into the room. For all that he’s slept for days, he looks terrible: ruffled, pale, bloodshot eyes – but the way he keeps blinking sluggishly reminds Dean of the little boy he used to be, coming back to his feet after a week of being down with the flu.

“You hungry?” he asks because that is still easier than saying ‘You’re craving demon blood right now?’ Sam nods and Dean gets the bottle currently in use and hands it to his brother. Sam stares at it for a long moment without opening it, until Dean realizes that he’s probably scared he won’t be able to hold back once he started drinking.

So Dean takes the bottle back, but instead of filling the blood into his own open palm the way Cas and Jena tend to do, he takes Sam’s hand and lets a few drops of blood fall onto his own palm. Everything inside him rebels against feeding his brother like a pet.

He tries not to watch as Sam licks the blood off his skin greedily and then closes his eyes and leans back a little, his expression as mix of relief and pain.

“How much longer will we stay here?” he finally asks, his voice rough.

“Couple of days,” Dean replies.

“And then?”

“Then we wait for Gabriel to find us while we keep moving,” Cas explains.

Sam just nods and reaches for his notebook. “We should restock while we’re in the city. How’s your hand?”

Cas lifts his hand and shows Sam the pink scar on his palm left by his own sword. “It healed well.”

No human would have healed that quickly, and any human would have needed to be very lucky to not retain lasting damage. But Cas is an angel and all that’s left is a scar. Even Dean’s palm, merely cut open on a sharp rock, looks worse.

“How is your head, Dean?” Sam wants to know, just when Dean wonders if he should feel neglected for Sam not worrying about him.

“It’s fine,” he grunts. “Don’t worry about me.” Sam just snorts softly and begins to write.

 

-

 

Later that day, Dean throws a not-yet-processed fur at Cas and asks him how to turn it into clothes. “We should make those silly hats with ears,” he suggests and Cas looks at him like he doesn’t know if he should laugh or cry.

They spend the rest of the day making clothes out of furs and spare blankets. Sam joins them at some point and makes fun of Dean’s inability to cut a clean shape with his hunting knife – not that Sam is much better. Cas rolls his eyes and guides their hands like a long-suffering parent and actually offers to read them a story when it’s time to go to sleep because his eyes are better with the dark and he’s obviously feeling like being silly. Dean accepts, just out of evilness.

To his surprise, Cas actually keeps to his offer.

 

-

 

The next day, something falls over a few floors below them, the sound echoing through the hollow building. They all start, staring at the open door to the corridor, their hearts beating in their throats. No other sound follows. It was probably the wind that is blowing strongly this day. Cas said there are windows broken on the lower levels.

They look at each other and silently agree to go packing.

 

-

 

When Cas said that there were broken windows on some of the floors, apparently that was an euphemism for “Some of the floors are lacking walls”. There are gaping holes that they pass on the way down, the long-dead cables swinging in the wind and their footsteps crunching over broken glass. The skyscraper they are in is just as much of a ruin as every other building and Dean is left feeling relieved that it didn’t just collapse under their asses.

The wind is icy, howling through the structure wherever there are holes on two sites and they have to keep to the right for a long stretch of way because part of the staircase is missing. Dean suspects that either Jena or Cas know the area very well, since that would be the only explanation how they could have thought this was a good place to be.

He has to wonder how Jena and Cas managed to get both him and Sam up there with both of them being out for the count. Can’t have been fun. He’s kind of glad he missed that part.

Also, he’s very glad that he didn’t know how badly damaged the building was while staying in it. Did wonders for his nerves.

They’re pretty high up. Of course Dean knew that before, but standing in front of a gaping hole with nothing behind it is kind of different to looking through a closed window.

Worst is how exposed Dean feels, though – even with their dark clothes before the dark backdrop of the unlit ruin.

Once again he sticks close to Sammy and notices Cas doing the same. Apart from the company, the whole trek down the building reminds Dean painfully of his way down the building he met Lucifer in, a lifetime ago. (Leaving behind Sam’s scarred, lifeless body, far up above Atlanta, with the Devil who had him on display like a fucking trophy.)

They pass the biggest hole, come to a part where the windows of the staircase are blackened by smoke and let through very little light. All of them are tense, expecting an attack at any moment. The darkness continues all the way down, until the stairs end at a door with a broken lock that leads into the entrance hall.

Broken glass doors let in the already fading daylight. The floor is made of marble – this was one of the more expensive office and apartment buildings, apparently. There’s a reception desk and behind it, barely visible in the shadows, what’s left of a skeleton.

The building must be full of corpses.

The wind hardly reaches them here, but they hear it whistle and scream around the ruins. It hits them full force once they step outside and for a moment Dean can barely breathe. The cape they created for Sam out of a blanket billows in the wind and nearly knocks him off his feet. He tumbles against Cas and is caught before he can be blown into the pile of rubble and broken glass beside the entrance.

In all the time since he woke up in the wasteland, Dean has never experienced a storm like this. It’s probably not a good idea to be outside in this weather – not in an area full of loose shindles, broken wood and stones balanced precariously on the edge of broken walls.

They get into the shelter of the next building, look for the best path away from their skyscraper. It’s not the only high building still standing in this city; through the window Dean saw a few others, some looking mostly intact, one little more than a skeleton, and one that leaned to the site until it crashed into another building, the two now standing in a colossal, unstable embrace. (There isn’t enough left of this place for Dean to recognize any special architectural landmarks.) But now they are all swallowed by the snow and dirt whirled up by the storm, leaving only the vague outline of something big nearby as a point of orientation.

They slip through a ruin and out on the other site, looking for new shelter while at the same time wanting to get away from their old one. There’s a reason they are leaving, after all. The further they get from the place all their traces lead to, the better.

But it’s hard, getting anywhere in this. Once, Dean looks the wrong way for a second and is overcome by a terrible sense of déjà vu when he turns to Sam and Cas and can’t see them. They emerge behind a small wall after a second, but it reminds him how very easy it would be to get lost here.

And there’s no telling how long this storm will last.

As soon as they find a remotely sheltered place, they rest; set down their bags and huddle together against the icy cold, Sam, as always, in the middle. Dean would aim for the next intact building if he could actually see it.

The only upside of the storm is that it conveniently blows away the traces they leave the snow.

Then they get up and go on. It’s a little easier to move forward once they reach an area where the buildings stand closer, but Dean keeps paranoidly expecting something heavy to fall down from above and crush one or all of them. The icy wind is cutting into their faces and hands and the view gets even worse as the daylight fades. Maybe they shouldn’t have left this late in the day. Maybe they should have waited out the storm.

Maybe Michael is already roaming the apartment they occupied until a few hours ago.

They are lucky that Sam has recovered from his illness as much as he did, otherwise it would have been a short trip. Even so, whenever they rest, Dean feels him tremble and hears him cough, almost non-stop. Out the in the open, the sound is torn away by the wind.

Eventually they come across a smaller building that still has four walls and a roof. The windows are all broken to let in the wind, but they pile up in a central room without windows that Dean believes has been a walk-in closet once.  He drags in the leftovers of a couch from the neighboring room and they try to get as comfortable as possible with the wind howling outside and just their body heat for warmth.

Contrary to what movies would have people believe, no sex happens between them that night. Instead, Dean listens to his brother’s rough coughs and worries that they’ll have to be audible for miles, when actually they won’t be audible outside the house.

Altogether, they probably didn’t make more than three hundred yards that day.

They spend a cold, miserable night that has Dean miss their old room and almost makes him regret their hasty retreat. Sam only falls asleep for an hour or two before weak light starts to fall in through the cracked door of their closet, while Dean and Cas don’t sleep at all, just sit there listening to Sam’s wheezing lungs, the wind and the darkness surrounding them.

 

-

 

The miserable night is followed by a miserable morning. Dean is stiff, his fingers icy despite having been wedged between his body and Sam’s all night, and he’s hungry and sore. Cas still moves like a cat and doesn’t seem to feel the cold as badly, but Dean can hear his stomach growl. They have a few bites that make their backpacks lighter but also reduce the number of days they can go without finding something new. Sam takes a few drops of blood, turning down the offer of more with obvious effort.

The storm hasn’t lessened. Maybe, Dean thinks, it never will.

They leave the dark hole they spend the night in and get back into the not much brighter day. Their fingers and faces are numb with the cold that wouldn’t be so bad if the wind didn’t make it feel about 20 degrees colder. At least their ears are protected by the hats they created just the day before leaving…

If their pursuers are sensible, they are not pursuing them all that hard in this weather. On the other hand, Dean doesn’t know from what direction they are pursuing them. He and the others might be running towards them rather than away.

Also, he’s not sure how impressed an archangel would be by a storm like this. And thinking back to the conversation he had with Jena about the drop in temperature, there’s no way of telling that the angels aren’t responsible for the storm in the first place.

Sam is slower this day than he was yesterday, stopping every so often to double over coughing or to catch his breath. The wind blows a few shards of broken glass off a windows sill once, to come crashing down right beside them and make them wary of staying too close to the walls that are the only thing protecting them from the full force of the storm.

At some point, Sam grabs Dean’s arm and points in the direction of Castiel, who stands a few yards away, his cape blowing in the wind to form a mockery of wings. He’s gesturing for them to follow and when they do he leads them down a slope and into the dark mouth of a tunnel.

The wind comes from the wrong angle to blow through it, so the moment they disappear into the dark, the wind stops, leaving only the chill that settled deep into their bones.

The first thing they do is stop, lean against the walls, and breathe. Sam’s coughing, trying visibly to calm down. It doesn’t work and the coughing just goes on and on and on.

Cas stands beside him, gently stroking his bend back, and Dean can barley see them from his place a few steps away until his eyes got used to the meager remnants of light.

Strangely enough, he feels neither the need to go over there nor jealousy. Cas is Sam’s friend and takes care of him. He’s done so for decades. There’s something comforting in the knowledge.

Cas’ concern for Sam is something Dean can rely on – and something he will have to rely on if they want to get through this together.

First they will have to get through this tunnel. It’ll protect them from the wind, but it’s also dark and there might be many things inside they can’t see. Cas has excellent night vision, though – he can lead them through this, and if it takes time, that’s all the same to Dean. He’s in no hurry of getting back into the icy wind.

Sam’s coughs echo in the dark, alerting anything and anyone who might be in here with them. Getting attacked is the one thing Dean worries about here. Without seeing anything it’ll be hard to only slash at what he wants to slash.

Also, the trek through the dark reminds him a little too vividly of getting lost in the mountain.

But this time, he’s not alone. And when Sam’s coughing has finally subsides and they are ready to move on, it’s Dean’s brother who steps over and says, “Hold on to my arm,” while Cas is already moving into the blackness ahead.

There’s so much about his brother Dean still doesn’t understand. “Is it the blood?” he asks after a minute or two of Sam leading him through the dark with sure steps, sometimes pulling him gently to the site to avoid an obstacle Dean can’t even get the barest hint of being there.

“I guess.” He can feel Sam shrug, the bony shoulder moving underneath the coat and blanket. “There is a car wreck right ahead. Careful.” He steers Dean all the way to the left until he touches the tiled wall of the tunnel and warns him to lift his feet. Dean awkwardly and blindly climbs over something metal, and ahead of him he hears something heavy being moved and flinches whit the rush of adrenaline running through him at the sound.

“That’s just Cas, getting something out of the way,” Sam assures him. Dean hates being so damn helpless and dependant on others.

If Dean tries really hard, he thinks he can see the weak shine of light at the end of the tunnel. It might be his imagination, though, or just the residual light creating shapes before his eyes that takes weeks to be fully gone. “We’re alone, right?” he asks, hating that he can’t see. “Think there’s anyone else in here?”

“No. No demons, at least.”

That doesn’t rule out humans, angels or any other kind of monster. Cold as it is, they wouldn’t even notice a ghost standing right beside them, and none of them have an angel-radar. Not even Castiel, as proven when he and Dean were ambushed in Georgia. And Sam…

Sam would only notice Lucifer approaching. So at least that guy isn’t anywhere near them.

Something is dripping down the wall next to them, making Dean wonder if the tunnel is going beneath a river and if there’s any chance it’s going to collapse under the weight of the water. He hopes not. The light before him has strengthened to the degree that he’s sure it’s actually really there, but it’s still very far away.

Cas is waiting for them a few steps away. Dean notices him because he blocks the light, but also because Sam mindfully lets his brother run into him. “Hi Cas,” Dean says once he pulled his hat out of his face.

“Hello.”

“How’s the weather.”

“Still bad, apparently.”

“Think that might be Michael’s doing?”

“What makes you think that?” Cas sounds honestly confused there.

“Jena mentioned the recent cold might not be entirely natural.”

Cas is silent after that. Dean can’t see them but he can fucking sense him and Sam exchanging a glance over his shoulder. “It’s possible,” Cas eventually says. “But it might just be nature."

The answer isn’t helpful, but Dean has stopped expecting anything really helpful for evaluating their situation. It sucks, their prospects are shitty, and no matter if the weather is natural or angel-induced, they will have to deal with it, period.

There’s a pile of cars near the exit of the tunnel, blocking the way. Even Dean can see them now, if badly. He only needs a little directing from the others to climb over the obstacle, but it’s still difficult because the whole thing shifts when he’s right on top of it and for one fearful second he’s convinced that the pile is going to collapse and crush Sam.

It doesn’t. Dean makes it to the other side without doing more than twist his ankle a little because the hood of a car he wanted to stand on while climbing down has a hole in it he didn’t see. The security of Sam’s and Cas’ movements that he can only vaguely make out makes him wonder if he was the only one needing the torches in the caves, or if the total blackness of that place, without the barest glimmer of light falling in from a far exit, was too much even for them.

Apparently, Sam’s vision isn’t perfect here either, or he didn’t pay enough attention, or maybe it’s just bad luck. In any case, he doesn’t make it over the cars entirely unscratched. It’s just a scratch on the hand though, from placing it on a shard of metal or broken glass or something and simply completes their set of hand injuries after Dean cutting himself on the rock and Cas getting his palm impaled by this own sword. Though Sam’s hands are already scarred enough so he really doesn’t need another one.

Dean only notices this new one when they are almost outside and he can see enough to make out his brother pressing his cape against his palm. Three minutes later the small but badly bleeding wound is dressed in a makeshift bandage and they stand in the mouth of the tunnel, discussing their options, which are few.

They can either stay here and wait until the next day, see if the storm will lessen, or they can move on and look for better shelter. In the end they all opt for moving on – the day’s still too young to waste like this, the tunnel protects them as long as the wind doesn’t change directions but offers no comfort otherwise and neither of them feels good with a space so open to two sides – least of all Dean, who would not make out anything creeping closer through the dark.

So they leave the shelter they have search for a better one, with Cas leading them out into the fading light.

 

-

 

There is a wide, open place that they have to cross, and just when they are about to reach the shelter of a lone wall, hardly able to breathe for the wind and hardly able to move for the cold, the wall collapses, nearly hitting Cas and taking away their shield with something that almost tastes like intent.

They light has begun to fade when they find more sturdy walls that protect them from the worst, let them rest a few minutes, have something to drink. Sam takes some blood and Dean notices that it’s more than the day before. Then they have to move on. It’s not a place where they can spend the night, and there don’t seem to be any usable houses anywhere near. The day that seemed so long before is running out on them now, and Dean really doesn’t want to be still out here when it gets dark.

The darker it gets, however, the more the wind lessens. They are still out after nightfall and the wind is still strong, but it no longer seems like an apocalyptic (hah!) gale that will never, ever stop. As if to make up for that, it starts to snow again, and by the time they finally find shelter in the reception area of a high office building whose lower floors miraculously survived after the whole thing collapsed to the site, they are all frozen through and Sam is coughing blood again.

The idiot tries to hide it, thinking the darkness will protect him from his big brother’s notice, but the snow reflects enough light for Dean to make out how Sam wipes his hand on the inside of his cape after a coughing fit and how Cas gravitates towards him in concern. They settle on an old plastic couch which they cover with all the blankets and furs they don’t need to wrap up in and Dean pulls Sam against him with an arm around his neck and mutters, “Don’t try to keep shit from me, Sammy.” Sam sighs warily and rests his head against Dean’s shoulder.

Dean feels no safer in this place than he did in the one they spent the last night in, but his exhaustion leaves him no choice but to sleep while Castiel keeps watch. Michael shows up around dawn, when Dean opens his eyes and sees the leader of Heaven sitting on the other side of Sam, watching him contemplatively. The sight makes Dean jerk in shock and snap, “Don’t touch him!” when Michael reaches out to stroke Sam’s cheek with his knuckles, and Sam doesn’t stir because of course this isn’t real and Michael isn’t really touching him.

Doesn’t mean Dean wants him to keep doing it.

“Would you believe it?” Michael looks up to meet Dean’s glare with his cool, almost amused gaze. “I have absolutely no interest in your brother. But he is such a convenient means to an end.”

“For the end of the world?”

“Naturally. But right now to get your attention.”

Dean reaches out to slap the bastard’s hand away from his little brother’s face, dream or no dream, causing Michael to let out a long suffering sigh.

“Do not worry about him. I have come for you, Dean. I am, perhaps, the only being in all of creation who cares for you more than for your brother.” He meets Dean’s stare with a smile that is at the same time patronizing and sad. “Castiel would abandon you in a heartbeat if it came to choosing between you and Samuel. All the demons are after him, as is most of Heaven. You barely register on the radar anymore – if you ever did. Even your own father preferred Sam over you, and your mother chose to die for him, in vain, leaving you behind without a second thought. You know it, Dean. Sam has always been in the centre of everything. For everyone else, you were the means to the end of getting Sam back to life, of manipulating him, of making him do as he was supposed to do. Even my brother” – Dean notices the disdainful twitch of the angel’s lips – “is sadly obsessed with him.”

“Is this going somewhere? Because if you’re trying to get in my good graces, you’ve chosen a weird angle for it.”

“You matter to me, Dean. I don’t want you to suffer needlessly. And I don’t want you to have to live in your brother’s shadow. You’re worth more than that. You tried to save the world, and you do not deserve the way they look at you for it.”

“If you were actually here, I would punch you,” Dean growls. “And no, I am not going to tell you where we are so you can come for a visit. I don’t even know so stop trying and get out of my dreams.”

Michael sighs. He never seems to grow tired of that act. “There are demons after you, Dean.”

“Tell me something new.”

“I don’t know where you are, but they seem to have a good idea. They will find you, soon. And then we will find you, eventually, but there is no telling what they will be able to do to you before I arrive.”

“Why do I get the distinct feeling that you’re trying to imply something with this?” Dean lifts his hands before Michael can answer. “Let me guess: You’re going to find us anyway, so I should just tell you where we are and spare us unnecessary trouble with demons. Am I right?”

“It would be the sensible thing to do.”

“Well, I proved that I’m not great at doing sensible things when I let you in, didn’t I?”

Michael seems indignant. “I disagree.”

“Shocking.” Dean hopes his sarcasm won’t let the archangel sense the icy nervousness that comes over him whenever the guy shows up. Somehow, he doubts it.

“Think about it, Dean,” Michael asks him. “Who is going to suffer most when they find you? You are not doing your brother any favors.”

“Funny, a minute ago you were all about how this was, for once, not about Sam.”

“Will Sam being tortured before your eyes make you happy?” Michael asks bluntly. “You care about him. You seek to do what’s best for him, do you not?”

“So I’m to assume that you will stroke his hair and sing him a lullaby?” Dean spits. “Why would I care if it’s a demon who tortures him to death or a self-righteous angel? All you’re doing is just giving me arguments to run faster.”

“You will not be able to run forever. Someone will catch up with you and then Sam will be hurt. I’m afraid that cannot be avoided, much as I regret it. And in the end, Sam will give in. And it will be better that way. It will be the right thing to do, Dean, you know this.”

“Sammy seems to think otherwise.”

“I know. Your brother is remarkably stubborn. It is obvious that he has been created to be my brother’s vessel.”

If he’s trying to not piss Dean off, he’s doing a very shitty job. “My brother isn’t just someone’s prom dress.”

“That is not my point.”

“No?”

“My point is that Samuel is lost, and only you can save him from a fate much worse than death.” Once again, Michael reaches out to stroke Sam’s cheek, and somehow that’s so much worse than any violence he could display. “You need to talk to him, Dean. You are the only one he will listen to.”

“Which is why I will support him, as I should have done all along, instead of working against him.”

“You are not working against him. This is for him more than anything else. The world as it is will fall, and be reborn as paradise as it should be. That is inevitable. We are patient and have all the time there is. It makes no difference whether this takes another day or another year, but for Sam that will mean another year of suffering. And his body is failing. Would you rather Lucifer gets a chance to torture him into saying yes than have him say yes on his own accord and be rewarded with eternal peace?”

“On the price of everyone else on the planet?”

“Open your eyes, Dean! This planet is lost. Who hasn’t starved or died of illness yet is going to freeze soon. There are forces perfectly willing to kill everyone if it meant taking away your reason to fight us. I still wish to preserve part of humanity to honor my father’s wishes. But for that to happen, for _some_ to have a chance, you both need to give in and let us end this. Give yourself over to me after you made Samuel say yes, so I will have the power to defeat Lucifer, and I will make sure the two of you will be together forever in Paradise.”

Dean opens his mouth to say something or maybe just to bite the damn hand that won’t fucking stop touching Sam. But Michael lifts his hand on his own, in warning. “Think about it, Dean. There may have been a point to your struggle once, but now it’s just childish stubbornness. Do not let others suffer for your pride.”

Then he’s gone and Dean comes awake with a start. Beside him, Sam wakes as well, sitting up with a gasp, blinking, disoriented and only half awake. “Shh,” Dean makes and pulls him back against his shoulder. Sam melts into him, his breath evening out within seconds, while Dean sits tense and wide awake and not interested at all in going back to sleep.

“Cas,” he whispers.

“What is it?” It’s dark but he can tell from the sound of his voice that Cas turned to them, probably the moment they woke up. Dean remembers that it’s probably bright enough for the angel to see them.

“Go to sleep.” He keeps his voice low so Sam can sleep on. “I’m awake now.”

“Did something happen?”

“Kind of.” No point in lying; Cas wouldn’t ask is something happened to Dean while he was sleeping beside him if he didn’t have a really good idea what it was. “But it doesn’t seem urgent. Just the usual blah blah. Get some sleep. I’ll tell you tomorrow.”

After a second he kind of vaguely senses Cas nodding and hears him settle into a more comfortable position. His breathing evens out quickly, almost too quickly to be natural. In all the time they traveled together, Cas never seemed to have a problem falling asleep if he really wanted to.

Dean is left behind in the world of the waking, not at all wanting to get more rest even though he is still tired and doesn’t think Michael will be back anytime soon.

He sits and thinks, and _feels_. Feels mostly dread, anger at the repeated violation of his dreams and that they are trying to use him against his brother again. Anger at himself for letting himself be used before. And doubt. Doubt that comes with looking at the world and knowing there’s little left to be fighting for. Michael being a jackass doesn’t mean he doesn’t have a point. They don’t stand a chance and Sam will be the one to suffer most. Dean is the only one who can spare him.

He concentrates on the anger because it pushes away these thoughts and feels Sam’s warm breath against the side of his neck.

 

-

 

The next day, the wind has all but died. The city is covered in snow and looks almost beautiful, in the same way there was a strange beauty to the pictures of the overgrown landscape of Chernobyl Dean once saw, taken years after the reactor went up.

There is no sound but the crunching of the snow under their boots as they walk on. They are moving towards the center of the city, hoping to find a supermarket, a clothing store, a gun maker, anything that might come in handy. Dean tells the others about Michael’s nightly visit, his voice sounding quiet but strong in the clear morning air. He doesn’t leave anything out.

Sam is silent throughout. He’s silent a lot nowadays, but right now it’s the kind of silence that is accompanied by a hanging head and staring at the snow in front of him, lost in thought. Maybe he’s thinking the same thoughts Dean was.

Cas snorts, full of contempt. “Michael will do anything to get you back on his side. He’s using your love for Sam for it, as if he knew anything about it.”

“He’s wrong, then?” Dean asks. “We have a chance? We’re not doing this to the world and ourselves – to Sam – only to lose in the end?”

“As long as we keep fighting, we haven’t lost.”

“Now you’re just sounding desperate.”

“I heard that from you.”

“Was I drunk?”

“Is that a hospital?” Sam suddenly asks. Dean looks up, irritated at the interruption that seems a little too pointed not to be intentional, but Sam’s looking straight ahead to a half-collapsed, half intact longish building behind a few ruins that have barely enough height left to block the view.

“Guess it might be,” Dean admits. They make their way over there and find the glass doors of the entrance broken, which doesn’t come as a surprise to anyone. It’s dark inside, but there are enough windows to allow them to see where they are going, at least near the entrance.

The deeper into the building the get, the more useless Dean becomes. As it happens, most storage rooms don’t have windows. He finds his fun place in a room on the fecund floor, where bandages upon bandages are waiting in a cabinet for him to pack as many as he can. Meanwhile, Sam and Cas are taking needles, compresses, clamps, and other useful stuff from the darker places.

This hospital was never raided. Dean wonders what happened here that killed everyone at once and kept anyone else from coming.

They saw the remains of no more than two people since leaving the building that sheltered them for a few days. There are barely any car wrecks on the streets. All the beds in the hospital are empty.

“Maybe they just left,” Sam says and makes Dean jump and turn to find his brother in the doorway. Either he can read thoughts now or he happened to be thinking exactly the same.

“Just like that? Why would they do that?”

“I don’t know. The virus, maybe. Perhaps they were all turned before the city was destroyed.”

“The virus?” Dean needs a moment to think before he remembers the illusion of a future Zachariah once send him to. “Croatoan?”

“Yes.”

“We haven’t seen a single infected person since I came back.”

“We’ve hardly seen anyone since _I_ came back,” Sam points out. “I don’t know if the virus still exists or if it died out. I asked Cas, but he doesn’t know either.”

“Hm.” Dean thinks about it. They met so many people on their journey, before they got Sam back, and any one of them could have been a Croat. Fantastic.

Especially since unlike Sam, he’s not actually immune to the virus for all he knows.

“Do you think that’s what happened?” Dean wonders. “That the virus took them all and left the place deserted?”

“I don’t know,” Sam admits. “Probably not.”

Looking out of the window, Dean sighs. Like so many other places, this city is keeping its secrets.

“I understand, you know,” Sam suddenly says. “Why you gave in to Michael.”

“Sam.” The word is half plea, half warning. But Sam shakes his head, comes into the room to sit on the edge of a cabinet with painfully stiff movements.

“No, I mean… it makes sense, doesn’t it? Especially seeing how this turned out. If Michael and Lucifer had had their battle in the beginning, half of mankind would have been killed off, but half would have survived and seen the paradise Michael intended. The way things turned out… much more than half died, Dean.”

“Sam, don’t do that.” Dean walks over to him and sits beside his brother. “Nothing of this is your fault.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“Yes, you did. And it’s bullshit. It would never have come this far if I hadn’t given in first. And we don’t know if Michael would have won. Might have been Lucifer, and then _everyone_ would have died.”

“And what difference would that have made?”

“There are people alive still.”

“Yes, but what kind of life is that? Lucifer would have killed everyone, but then they would have gone to Heaven. Which exists. Which we _know_. He doesn’t want them in Hell, you know?”

“Yeah, I know, actually. But they aren’t going to Hell now, either.”

“How do you know? As long as they are alive, they can fuck it up. People damn themselves all the time. They kill each other for food or make deals with demons. All those people… did I damn them out of pride, Dean? Because I wanted to have the last word?”

“No, Sammy!” Dean wants to take him in his arms and smother him in his shirt so he can’t say anything else. “Don’t start thinking like that. This is exactly what Michael wants.” It doesn’t matter that Dean thought the same not five hours ago, because right now Dean realizes that he made his choice, and his choice is to support what his brother fought for.

“It’s not like this is a new thought,” Sam whispers. Dean still doesn’t touch him, just leans forward with his elbows resting on his own knees while his heart quietly breaks.

“Why did you keep fighting all these years?” he asks. “Just to give me the finger? I mean, not that I didn’t deserve it, but I surely didn’t deserve you suffering that much to prove me wrong.”

“No, because… because at first I really thought we had a chance. That we could somehow get Michael out of you and defeat Lucifer and everything would go back to normal. But year after year passed and more and more people died and… at some point I realized that the point had passed where my decision would still have had the better outcome. By that time, the only thing I could do was hold off for anyone who was still fighting. And…”

“And what?” Dean asks softly when Sam’s voice trailed off.

“And I had to keep going because not doing it would render the suffering of everyone already lost pointless. It has to have been for something, Dean.” And then he looks at Dean like a lost little boy desperate for confirmation, or maybe absolution, as something only his big brother can give.

This moment, right here, for the first time in ages, Dean _feels_ like a big brother again. He reaches out after all, ready to pull Sammy’s head against his chest and kiss his hair like he would when they were kids, when a thundering sound from the outside makes them jump.

 

-

 

The sound swells up like an incoming wave about to crash, rapidly becoming louder until it drowns any other sound. Dean and Sam are already running; the sound comes from the distance, far away and yet all consuming, and they need to see what it is even though it probably means danger.

They meet Cas as they are running outside. Together, they emerge from the building just when the noise dies. But there is a giant cloud of dust rising in the west, right where the two buildings leaning against each other used to stand. Now there is only one building, and as they watch, it leans over more and more, starting to fall in slow motion, its support already gone. The thunder is back, echoing through the city as another giant dies.

They watch in silence as the cloud of dust and dirt spreads over the ruins around, too far away for them to be affected. Eventually, they agree without words that they got all the supplies they can get from this place and walk on, looking for another building that might serve them.

The cloud lingers for a long time. It makes Dean worry about the one other tall building they pass, but the mall they finally find is mostly buried in the ground, and while it still can fall on and crush them, at least it won’t crush them with quite as much vengeance.

Inside, it’s dark again, but several holes where the buried ceiling has broken through allow for enough light for even Dean to get around. Most shops inside the mall have collapsed, but they find a clothes store with all kinds of shit from bathing suits to prom dresses. It’s really pretty dark in there, though, so Dean is mostly useless, sitting around near the entrance between clothes that have fallen apart on their racks, eaten by mold and time, and other clothes that are dirty and dusty but otherwise intact. Ah, the wonders of synthetic materials.

So some of the companies weren’t actually kidding when they claimed their products would get their owners to the end of the world.

Cas and Sam come out with some stuff eventually, including the proper coats they were all sourly lacking until now. Sam’s brought a knee long coat of probably fake leather, with soft lining, that he tosses at Dean with a grin, and Dean grins right back at him because the thing looks cool and awesome. It’s pretty heavy, and together with the blanket-cape will keep Dean warm, hopefully. At least down here he feels much better for wearing the thing.

Cas got himself a sort but thick jacket with a hood lined with fake fur, and Sam’s wearing something made of black cloth under his blankets that goes all the way down to his ankles. He rolls his eyes and groans when Dean checks the material for its keep-Sammy-warm potential, but it’s lined and pretty heavy as well. Acceptable. Sam’s also wearing a pair of fingerless gloves and all he needs now is a proper hat and he’d look like a gunslinger from a western.

So Dean happens to have a thing for westerns. He’s perfectly okay with that as long as he doesn’t think about how he’s never going to see another one again, in his life.  Eventually, the face of Clint Eastwood might fade from his memory as well.

He kind of killed Clint Eastwood. Probably. The man was badass, but he was also old when the apocalypse started, and Dean’s pretty sure that Hollywood and its stars were the first things Michael smashed to pieces.

So that’s something for Dean’s resume: broke the first seal, let down his brother, killed Dirty Harry.

He’s really, really not thinking about it.

It’s easier not to think of anything when Sam and Cas come back again and Cas is wearing this utterly ridiculous blue hat. Dean and Sam will stick with their equally stupid but lovingly self-made ear-hats, thank you very much.

There might be more useful stuff in there, but none of it better than what they already have, and their storage space is limited. So they move on.

Unfortunately, the entire northern part of the mall is crushed, denying them access. They take a break in what might have been a pet store once, feeling safe enough in here. Sam gets a little blood, Dean and Cas eat half of what’s left of their supplies. They need to find food, soon, or Sam’s not going to be the only one at a risk of starving.

Dean would also appreciate restocking on bullets and maybe getting a gun for Sam. They climb up through one of the holes in the ceiling after they are done eating and wander down a street that looks like it once contained a lot of stores lined side by side.

They do find a supermarket in the end, but the roof has been blown away, the shelves are fallen over and everything on them is buried or crushed, so far as it hasn’t rotten away to nothing centuries ago. There’s a pile of paper-mash half-buried by snow that might once have been a couple of magazines. Luck is not with them.

Until they discover that while the shop is gone, the storage in the back has survived mostly intact. Cas goes in there alone while Sam and Dean sit down on a dry spot underneath the remains of the roof so Sam can rest his aching legs. He leans back with a sigh and closes his eyes, and Dean notices the bright spots of fever on his pale cheeks. The weather is good but Sam is still sick. They’d do better not to forget that.

Cas is gone for a while which either means that there’s a lot of food to choose from or that there’s nothing at all and he won’t give up looking before he’s gone through every last corner. Dean would put his money on the second option. His stomach growls in protest to his thoughts.

“If we don’t find anything here, we’ll go hunting,” Sam suddenly says. “So far, we always found something to eat.”

“I’m not worried about that,” Dean tells him. He’s not, not really. Now the wind has died and the snow lies undisturbed, they’ve seen the tracks of rabbits every now and then. At some point a small group of birds flew over their heads. Those are things they can shoot and eat. It’s just that eating something from a can would be much easier. And canned food they can take with them for a long time without it going bad.

“I wish…”

Dean doesn’t find out what his brother wishes for because Sam stops himself, frowns, and suddenly sits upright, looking around in confusion.

“What is it?” Dean asks, alarmed. He’s taking out his gun, ready to aim, when Sam’s shoulders slump again.

“Nothing. I thought…” He trails off, shudders, still looking nervous. How’s that supposed to calm Dean down?

“If you thought you heard something, you’d better tell me,” Dean growls. “Even if it was just your imagination. Better overcautious than walking into a trap.”

Sam opens his mouth, and closes it again, looking alert. This time, Dean can hear it, too: footsteps crunching on the snow, coming closer. He brings up his gun and finds himself aiming at Cas, who just then emerges from behind the shelf Sam is leaning against.

“What is wrong?” he asks, equally alarmed, when he notices how nervous they are. Sam shakes his head.

“I… nothing. I thought there was something, but there isn’t.”

Cas frowns, but doesn’t look overly worried. When he notices Dean’s own frown, he explains, “Sam’s senses play tricks on him sometimes. It’s a side effect of his soul being…damaged.”

A nice way of saying ‘decades of torture broke your brother’s head’. And not helpful. “How do we know it’s really just a trick of his mind?”

“We don’t. But if he says there’s nothing now, there probably isn’t. Here.” Cas hands Dean a small, heavy bag that’s filled with a few cans of conserved food.

“That’s all?” Dean wants to know, fighting disappointment. He should be glad there was anything at all with the place looking the way it does

“There are some more I already packed. This will get us through some days.”

“We should leave here,” Sam suddenly says. He has his arms wrapped around his own shoulders and keeps shivering, but that might be just because it’s cold and he’s sick.

“Do you sense something again?” Dean enquires. Sam shakes his head.

“It just makes me nervous that I did. As you said, we can’t tell when I’m mistaken. I don’t like it.”

“We’ve been here long enough anyway,” Cas agrees. “It’s getting cold. We shouldn’t sit still for too long.”

The light is already getting dimmer. They move on, maybe a little faster than before, and Sam stays as nervous as he was, though he frequently tells the others that there’s nothing there. Dean wonders if it’s a sign of withdrawal, but Sam refuses the blood that’s offered to him.

Though it’s hard to orient himself in the unfamiliar ruins, Dean gets the impression that they are moving away from the center and towards the outskirts of the city. His thoughts drift to Jena, wondering what she’s doing and how she can even hope to find them if even her most powerful big brothers can’t.

Altogether, it takes them two more days to leave the city. Fortunately, the wind remains barely notable, which not only makes their journey less unpleasant, it also makes their nights a little less unbearable, since the ruins they hole up in are severely lacking in comfort and intact doors. Somewhere, the cold always gets in.

There’s more food now, but little sleep for any of them. Sam’s wheezing keeps them all awake: Sam because he can’t breathe right and whenever he starts to drift off, a new coughing fit pulls him back to wakefulness. Dean because Sam’s noises and his worry for him keep him awake, and Cas because someone has to keep watch. If his senses work on the same level as Dean’s, he has a hard time hearing anything over the sound of Sam’s tortured breathing.

The second night is even worse than the first because they are all tired, cold and miserable. Dean insists on Cas trying to get some sleep while he takes over first watch, but he doesn’t think his friend is any more successful than he was the night before, even though exhaustion forces Sam’s body to fall asleep every now and then, despite the cough. It’s never long before his lungs or his nightmares make him jerk awake again and bring everyone else with him.

There are few moments when Dean really misses Jena, but at least she could take over all the watches since she doesn’t have to sleep.

The next day, Sam stumbles a lot. They take more breaks than usual, and Dean feels worse during them than he normally does, more exposed, because they are almost out of the city and the destruction is actually worse here, as if the time is eating the city from the edges inward. There are hardly enough places they can even crouch behind. Eventually, they kind of force Sam to drink a healthy dose of demon blood, much more than he usually takes. He is a little better afterwards, but he’s also an emotional mess.

It’s frustrating for Dean to watch because he couldn’t ever understand what his brother is going through.

Again, Dean would have felt better with Jena around. Her powers offer a sense of security Dean never even noticed while she was still with them. Now he feels even more vulnerable than usual, especially with the cover getting less and less.

There is the outline of a smaller town just visible on the horizon. Dean guesses that own will be their next stop, if only because if offers a point of orientation.

Without Jena, they don’t even have a plan anymore – unless Cas has an idea and never bothered to tell Dean.

At least Sam’s nervousness lessened during the day he spent almost delirious. Now that he’s better the nervousness is back, and it’s catching. Dean keeps looking over his shoulder, but they are walking over a wide stretch of hard snow and there’s nothing in any direction but the ruins they left behind.

That is, at least, until midday, when Sam has one second to panic before they are no longer alone.

They all see them at the same time, because Sam turns around so quickly that they have no choice but to look as well, just in case there actually is something to be seen for once.  And there is: far away, visible just as tiny figures against the backdrop of the ruined city, are a number of figures, walking in their direction.

They don’t seem to be in a hurry, but there is no doubt that they are coming after them. The fact that the strangers don’t bother to run in their pursuit only indicates that the ones they are pursuing have no hope of getting away.

“Demons?” Dean asks, and Sam nods wordlessly. “Shit.”

There are four of them, and while they don’t move any faster than Dean and the others, they will have caught up with them in less than a day because Dean and the others need to rest every now and then and the demons do not. And when they got them…

Between them, they have one demon killing sword and one demon killing Sam. Dean doesn’t know what the others have, but they seem damn smug just walking after them. He is acutely aware that they are being toyed with.

So everything inside him resists the urge to run, just in order to not do the demons that favor. But that’s just stubbornness and pride, and maybe some fatalism since he’s pretty sure that running won’t make any difference. His instincts insist on running, though, and his mind is already busy trying to come up with a plan for when they are caught.

What they do, in the end, is some kind of compromise: they don’t run from the demons but walk from them. The snow doesn’t leave them much other choice, since even though it’s rather hard they aren’t as fast as they would be walking on earth. On top of that, Sam wouldn’t be able to keep up in a run, and keeping him away from the enemy is their top priority still.

And one would think that keeping away from Sam would be any demon’s top priority as well. That fact that these are not offers a couple of possible explanations: They could be idiots, for example, thinking that four of them would be enough to overpower one Sam and one angel sword. (Unlikely, but Dean likes the idea. Enemies that overestimate themselves are a blessing.) They could not know who they are pursuing. (Even more unlikely. As if any demon on this planet didn’t fucking know that.) Or they could be herding them towards another group of demons, this one really large enough to overpower them.

Or Lucifer is with them, sitting somewhere nearby and snickering into his fist. Also unlikely, since Sam would sense him (wouldn’t he?), but there has to be _something_ they don’t know.

Dean’s gaze keeps seeking the town they are aiming for – still far away, but if they make it, they might be able to hide and create a trap of their own. Alternatively, that might be where the demons’ trap snaps closed.

“Think they belong to Lucifer?” he asks, keeping his vice low even though the four figures are too far away to hear anything they say.

Sam shakes his head.

“So, Crowley’s, then?”

“Must be. Or they don’t belong to anyone. But they… if they support Lucifer, they are not among those he favors. He wouldn’t have let them come after us.”

“So if they are his, they will be in trouble if they actually get us. Lucifer doesn’t take well to his underlings touching his vessel without permission,” Cas adds. Well, that’s something that will certainly be comforting to know to know while the demons are torturing them to death…

“How can you be so sure they aren’t on Satan’s buddy list?” Dean wants to know, then almost regrets it when Sam just throws him a short glance and then looks away. It makes Dean’s stomach turn before he even starts thinking about what that might mean.

Being who he is, he can’t just let that go. Castiel spares him the decision whether or not to actually ask. “Lucifer rewards those who serve him well,” is all he says.

It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that Sam can tell demons apart through whatever way he senses them. So Lucifer rewards those that please him. So Sam knows the ones that please Lucifer well enough to recognize them even after a long time.

Yeah, that doesn’t take a genius to figure out either.

In the end, it’s Sam who unexpectedly puts an end to the chase. He just stops running at some point. They are much closer to the next town, maybe thirty minutes from it at the pace they are walking, and Dean is sure they can make it, but Sam doesn’t seem inclined to try. Perhaps he knows something Dean doesn’t. Perhaps he’s just fed up with this bullshit. Fed up with being chased and toyed with and turned into a victim.

So he turns on his heels and starts walking towards the demons instead. Dean and Cas are taken by surprise but follow him. Whatever Sam’s planning, they are with him. Dean is quite tired of this game as well.

The demons for sure seem startled. They are still a good bit away, but Dean can see them falter in their steps and come to a halt to look at each other. Sam actually picks up speed as if he couldn’t wait for the confrontation. He has to be absolutely beat after the long trek over the half-frozen snow. He’s sweating despite the cold. Dean realizes that he’s running on last reserves.

Hopefully, the demons don’t realize it as well.

They’ve come to a decision, it seems, because the resume their march towards them. Dean has half-hoped Sam unexpectedly taking the initiative would scare them away, but no such luck. Instead, three of them suddenly disappear only to materialize out of thin air right in front of them.

“Well, well,” one of them says in greeting. “You think you’re so strong now, right? I could smell your weakness all the way back there. Followed your scent. You smell like approaching death and now you think you can scare us? You’re so cute, Sammy!” The demon has wrapped its host’s face in a scarf and only through the voice can Dean tell that the body it’s wearing is female. She comes walking over to them, reaching out her hand in Sam’s direction and Sam straightens, getting ready. Before he can do anything to defend himself, the weak light reflects off something flying through the air and then Castiel’s sword is embedded in her chest and the demon inside flickers out with a final, aborted scream.

The next second, Cas is flying backwards, landing hard on the snow, and one of the other demons, steps over to him, a knife in his hand. He’s not going to tease and play this time, Dean can tell. They want to take Cas out of the picture.

Fortunately, his sword isn’t the only weapon they have that’s effective against demons. Before the guy can take more than two steps, he stops as if he ran against an invisible barrier, suddenly unable to move.

The last demon is in a similar situation. Sam’s hand is lifted, his face screwed up in a grimace of pain and effort that Dean has seen so often before, but he’s got a handle on this. For the moment.

Looking back, Dean sees the final demon, the only one the others left behind when jumping places, still walking towards them. He’s just a few minutes away, and while he can’t be all that powerful if he can’t even teleport, Dean isn’t sure Sam can handle three of the guys at once.

He doesn’t have to. Cas uses the momentary immobilization of their enemies to retrieve his sword and kill the one who threw him. Only one remaining, and this one is putting up a fight, struggling with all he has against Sam’s hold. Knowing it’ll be lost if it doesn’t win this, and look at that, a demon with self-preservation instincts. What a novelty.

Apparently, the adrenalin surge that comes with impending death has the same effect on demons as it has on humans: it powers them up. Sam is swaying, visibly struggling to remain in control despite having only one demon to deal with now. And yet, Cas hesitates to kill this one.

Because if it’s dead, they can’t ask questions. The demon still free could easily get away before Sam gets a hold on it – in fact, Dean is surprised it hasn’t yet. And yet, they need to do something, soon, before Sam loses that battle.

So Dean draws his own knife from its holster and crouches behind the demon, quickly scratching a devil’s trap into the hard, icy snow. Then he grabs hold of the demon and pulls him backwards until he’s standing on the seal, unable to run, smoke out or attack them. Sam visibly relaxes the moment the demon is otherwise contained. He throws his brother a grateful smile while Cas positions himself right beside the demon, ready to strike at any moment.

“I’m not gonna tell you anything,” the demon says before they can even ask. “You’re going to kill me anyway.”

“Actually, no,” Sam tells him. “We keep to our deals – that’s how they work. Cooperate and we wouldn’t gain anything from killing you but others hearing about it and being stubborn when their time comes. You answer our questions and we’ll only send you back to Hell.”

“You probably won’t be flattered if I tell you that my boss likes the way you think. Breaking deals is bad for business.”

“So you’re one of Crowley’s,” Cas muses. “You have been following us for weeks.”

The demon screws up his face, like he revealed something he didn’t mean to reveal. He doesn’t seem to be one of the brighter ones. “How do you know that?”

“Your bloodhound gave you away,” Dean lets him know, remembering the feel of fingers closing around his throat in the dark. “Right before Sam killed her.”

Sam just throws the demon a brief grin. The demon looks uncertain, but then he’s grinning himself, and when Dean follows his gaze he sees the last remaining demon come up behind Sam, just a dozen yards away. He gives Sam a warning and Sam turns, Cas gets ready to throw his sword – but before either of them can do anything, the guy throws back his head and the demon inside escapes to the stratosphere.

It happens so sudden that Dean can only stare. Until this moment, the demon never showed any sign of slowing down and now this. Perhaps it was particularly weak and stupid and didn’t get the danger until it was nearly too late, but all of Dean’s instincts instantly scream for caution. The cloud of smoke doesn’t return, though, doesn’t try to possess any of them, so Dean looks around for Jena, to see if she found them and was somehow responsible for this weird stunt.

The demon’s host stumbles and falls to his knees, catching the fall with his hands. Still alive, then. The man goes down for barely a second before he looks up, his gaze going straight to Sam. Not even acknowledging Dean’s and Cas’ presence, and there’s no confusion and panic in his eyes.

Dean’s warning comes too late because the guy is inhumanly strong. A monster possessed by a demon and this was all a trap and Dean is ready to attack but he’s too slow and he doesn’t even know what he’s dealing with. A hand to his chest shoves him backwards, makes him fly and knocks the air out of his lungs even before hitting the ground. There’s a vague impression of Cas faring no better. He never got another chance to put his sword to use.

Sam takes a step back, his hand raised in defiance. He’s using his powers – snow flies up around him and Dean can _feel_ the power being called by his brother’s mind – but his aim is off, he’s out of practice and unprepared and taken by surprise, and whatever he’s facing is too powerful for his weak attempt to fight it. The monster is upon him in a matter of seconds and Dean lifts his head just in time to see the guy grab Sammy’s hair, pull back his head and sink long, sharp teeth into his skin of his neck.

A fucking vampire. They are being ambushed by a vampire possessed by a demon. For all this fucking time they never met any supernatural being except the ghosts they created, and now one of them has his fangs in Sammy’s neck and is drinking his blood. Dean tries to get up but his legs are failing. He fumbles for his gun, manages to get it out and aim. He hits the vampire in the side, just above the hip. It doesn’t harm him like a machete to the neck would have, but it’s enough to get his attention. With a grunt, he lets go of Sam, who falls to the ground and lies still as the vampire turns to Dean, and to Cas who must have lost consciousness and is just beginning to move again.

Instead of stomping them into the ground as he easily could have done, the vampire moves the edge of his shoe across the devil’s trap the last demon is trapped in before turning back to Sam and ignoring the others entirely. Dean fires another shot at him, then at the demon, but neither is particularly impressed by his firepower. The demon is holding the angel sword in his hand. Dean expects him to kill Cas with it, but the hell-spawn just kicks the angel, then spits in Dean’s general direction, and throws a dark look towards the vampire.

“Be careful with that,” he orders. “If you kill him, all deals are off.”

Snorting, the vampire hauls Sam upright and into his arms. He doesn’t bite again, but licks off the blood that’s still running from the ugly wound in Sam’s neck. On some level, Dean actually does register that he should be worried about the demon who has him at his mercy, but all that threat means to him is that he’s held down by an invisible power and can’t get up to save his brother.

Sam is moving weakly, trying to push his attacker away with uncoordinated movements. “You’re delicious,” the vampire says gently. “All that power in your veins. Demons are disgusting, humans are boring. But you, child…” He runs his knuckles down Sam’s cheek, his neck, lets it disappear beneath the rim of Sam’s coat. “You’re the perfect mix. Stinking demon-crap distilled into something beautiful.”

“Why don’t you…” Sam gasps for air, a note of pain in his voice. “…write a fucking poem about it?”

“I might. Gonna write it in the blood of your brother, on the corpse of your friend. Although, food is hard to come by these days. I might keep him and the angel for hard times. Never tasted an angel before. Think he might taste better than you?” The vampire runs the tips of his fingers over Sam’s face, leaving traces of his own blood. He grins and then he leans in and presses his lips to Sam’s in a brutal kiss.

Dean can’t move. He can’t move, can’t fucking move!

Sam struggles, but it’s not doing much. The demon cackles, finding it all incredibly funny. “Leave a piece for me,” he calls over to his unlikely ally. “If I’m getting my ass kicked for this, should at least be worth it.”

Much to Dean’s relief, the vampire stops what he’s doing and lets Sam drop to the ground again as he gets back to his feet. He kicks him in the chest when Sam’s making a move to push himself up and he’s left lying there gasping for air and Dean doesn’t like that at all, but it’s better than the kiss and it’s a thousand times better than the vampire’s hand under his clothes. Dean is going to tear off his head with his bare hands if he has to. Sammy killing Gordon Walker with barbed wire will have nothing on him.

So the vampire comes over and the demon disappears. With the demon, the demon’s power also leaves, but the vampire has both Dean and Cas by the throat and presses them down, not giving them any chance to put up a fight. It is a little surprising, actually, that they aren’t outright killed, so their attackers must need them for something. Dean can’t think about that. He can’t breathe.

Sam is coughing painfully somewhere out of sight.

The demon comes back after a maybe a minute, if that. He comes carrying, with strength no human possesses, a heavy metal frame he unceremoniously drops to the ground. It has to be taken from some building, probably part of the supporting structure, and Dean wouldn’t have a chance to move it an inch, let alone lift it.

Again, he’s surprised when it isn’t used to crush them. Instead, the demon manhandles him to lean against one of the beams of the structure and ties him to it, using the rope from their own damn backpacks. Cas is suffering a similar fate, just with the vampire doing it, and when he’s done, the vampire leans in and bites Cas’s neck. Cas jerks, lets out a pained sound, and the vampire jumps back as if somebody had punched him in this face, spitting out a mouthful of blood.

“Disgusting,” he judges. “The filth of this world seems to have thoroughly corrupted your body. I should wait for a real angel to come along.”

Cas doesn’t react to that with anything other than a glare, and Dean just knows that if Cas were still a real angel, the damn vampire would have died the moment he tasted the first drop of blood.

Unfortunately, the vampire seems eager to get rid of the bad taste in his mouth. “If you drink any more, he’s probably gonna die,” the demon, who seems much more relaxed now he doesn’t need to restrain the captives with his powers anymore, cautions when his comrade pushes Sam’s hair out of the way once again. “And then I’ll have the boss know it was all your fault and I’ll watch with glee as he tears you apart.”

“He’s right,” Dean hears himself call out. “Don’t touch him. You want him alive, right? Take me instead, I may not taste exotic, but I’m fit and full of blood and entirely expendable.”

The vampire eyes him contemplatively for about a second before he takes him up on his offer.

 


	17. Chapter 17

The pain is not entirely unfamiliar. It’s not the first time Dean is bitten by a vampire and he already knows the tearing sensation that runs through his body down to his fingertips, the feeling of all his strength being drained. All the myths about being bitten bringing near orgasmic bliss are bullshit. It just brings pain.

It goes on and on, until Dean begins to feel dizzy; until he wonders if their strange pair of attackers might not want to keep them alive after all, or if the vampire forgot about that in his bloodlust. But just when Dean is nearing the brink of oblivion, he is released and sinks forward in his bonds, panting, trying to clear his head by shaking it and only making the dizziness worse.

He can’t pass out. He needs to watch over Sam, can’t lave him alone here, can’t…

“Dean,” he hears Cas’ voice from far away. “Are you alright?”

“No.” He didn’t mean to say that, but it’s true. “Sam…”

“Shut up, okay?” the demon standing beside them says surprisingly gently. “Relax and watch the show.” There’s a short intake of breath indicating he wanted to say more, but he doesn’t get around to it. A startled sound, a gasp of surprise from Castiel and a truly disgusting, wet tearing noise that makes Dean’s stomach flip later the demon’s body falls to the ground, blood steaming out of the giant wound in the place where his head used to be attached to his body. The body barely touches the snow before a cloud of black smoke emerges from the severed neck and escapes towards the sky with a sound reminiscent of an angry scream.

Hope rushes through Dean with vigor even as his brain struggles to understand what happened. He finds the strength to look up, turn around, and only realizes he expected to see Jena standing beside him when the disappointment and despair hit him all the harder at the sight of the vampire holding the head he must have torn off with his bare hands.

The head hits the snow beside Dean’s ankle, half-closed eyes staring at him without expression.

“What the hell?” he manages. “I thought you were working together.” And perhaps, perhaps…

“We were,” he vampire confirms. “Up until now. The demons needed a non-demon to get close to Sam Winchester and I want Lucifer gone. That’s how far our alliance went. He would have killed me now he doesn’t need me anymore, so I had to be quicker.”

Any hope Dean may have had about the vampire secretly, for whatever unfathomable reason, being on their side, dies. “So what are you planning to do?” he asks warily. “You can’t kill Sam, it would only work in Lucifer’s favor.”

“I don’t plan on killing any of you. I’ll just leave you incapacitated and be on my way before the others show up.”

“What others?” That’s Castiel. Dean can see him struggle against his ropes but they are tight and secure. “Are you working for Crowley?”

“I work for myself. Some demons just happen to work towards a goal I support. That scum.” The vampire snorts and walks back over to Sam who has just managed to drag himself to his knees. He has no way of defending himself when the vampire kicks him in his chest and sends him sprawling again.

Dean wants to yell at him, to make him stop, get back his attention so it won’t be focused on his brother, anything. He just manages a weak sound, pathetic all around. But Cas, Cas can still speak and he says, “You’re killing him. If you keep this up, you’ll kill him and Lucifer will win.”

“I know what I’m doing,” the vampire shrugs off his words. “And even if he dies, what’s it to me? I’ll leave it to chance. He lives, your struggle may go on a little longer. He dies and maybe Lucifer will reward me for finally getting him his prize – or for breaking his vessel for him. To be honest, I think his death will offer the better outcome.”

“No,” Dean manages, but it’s so quiet and ineffective. He hopes the vampire will kill him, too, and that no one will bother to drag him back into this world.

He’ll go to Hell and become a demon just to be close to Sam again.

His wrists are raw from struggling against his bonds, but now, with the blood gone from his body, he doesn’t even have the energy left to keep harming himself in his attempt to escape. The structure he’s bound to shakes and shifts none the less, with Castiel’s inhumanly strong efforts to break free. He’s yelling something, but Dean isn’t listening anymore. The dizziness gets worse and it’s so tempting to let oblivion take him away so at least he won’t have to watch his brother die.

But he can’t run from this, can’t leave Sam alone again. So he forces himself to look up and watch as the vampire kneels over his brother’s body, claws working through his clothes, while Sam struggles weakly and perhaps calls Dean’s name. Dean’s ears are ringing, his head pounding. The vampire says something about maybe being the last of his kind and all this being Sam’s fault for opening the damn cage, Dean’s for letting in Michael, Cas’ for letting it all happen.

But he doesn’t kill Sam. Not outright. He does what Dean heard so much about and never wanted to see (again). What he had hoped would never happen to Sam again. And now it’s happening on his watch, but he _can’t_ even watch, can’t bring himself to take even that much torture for his brother. The sounds are bad enough, maybe worse (grunts and whimpers, flesh slapping against flesh, moans of pleasure as the vampire keeps lapping at the wound in Sam’s neck) and Dean’s fingernails break against the metal he’s bound to but the vampire is not interested in the blood flowing from his hands, not in the least.

 

-

 

Afterwards, the vampire just leaves. He straightens his clothes and walks away, leaving Dean and Cas bound helplessly and Sam sprawled on his shredded clothes, naked and bleeding. He’s barely moving at all and it’s so fucking cold, Dean can’t keep his teeth from clattering after sitting still for so long, can barely feel his fingers. This is how they are going to die.

‘Cas,’ he wants to say, see if the angel has any idea, any plan, anything at all that will serve them, free them, get them to safety, but the word that leaves his mouth is “Sammy.”

There’s no wind. The air is perfectly still and every sound travels easily over the frozen snow. Only through this can Dean make out the small, quiet whimper that escapes his brother’s lips. He’s still awake. He’s lying there, just out of reach, and he probably knows that he’s going to die, that no help is coming, that Dean and Cas both failed him. Not six feet away from him, not four feet away from Dean’s uselessly kicking feet is one of the bags with their supplies, left behind by the vampire who couldn’t care less. Blankets, clothes, demon blood, stuff that maybe could still safe Sam, all there and just out of reach.

There’s a knife in Dean’s thigh holster that he never got around to drawing and he’s completely unable to reach it and cut his bonds.

The world’s not spinning anymore. Dean doesn’t know if that’s a good or a bad sign. He just hopes that death will come quickly to him. That he won’t have to sit here beside his brother’s unmoving body for hours, longing to hold him just one more time and imagining what is being done to his soul at any given moment. When Lucifer is going to move in and reanimate that broken body.

(The vampire wanted them all to suffer and he found the perfect way; at least for Dean, this is already Hell.)

But Sam’s not dead yet. He’s still moving, managing to turn onto his side and curl up weakly. Dean calls out to him but there’s no reaction, just Sam breathing hard and then chocking on a cough he’s too weak to let out, or maybe a strangled sob.

Dean calls out again, his heart pounding wildly in his chest with something he can’t identify. If he can just bring Sam to get to the bag, to get a blanket…

…it wouldn’t be enough. It wouldn’t even postpone the end for all that long. And Sam’s fingers are twitching, but they must be numb, which is better than the pain he has to be in. (He’s freezing to death, his body is going numb, and that’s a good way to die, here, the moments before dying the last break before the torture that yet awaits him.) Dean blinks and his tears feel oddly hot on his freezing face.

Sam sets his palm to the ground and slowly pushes himself up on trembling arms. He finally looks up, but he’s not seeing the bag he needs, is focused on Dean instead and his eyes are burning with determination.

Then he’s upright, standing on shaking legs for not even a second before toppling over again. Too hurt, too weak. But he’s a little closer to Dean now, and he starts crawling. Dragging himself through the snow. His gasps speak of pain but he doesn’t make any sound that’s not connected to breathing. He’s on a mission.

His way ends half-lying on Dean’s legs and this close, Dean can hear the rattle in his lungs. “Sammy,” Dean says. “You almost made it. Just a second and I’ll help you. I’ll get you warm, just wait for it. You’re gonna be okay.” Maybe he’s been rambling like this all the time. It feels like it but he’s not actually sure.

Sam collapses onto him for about five seconds before he rolls off, lying in the snow with Dean’s knife miraculously in his hands – Dean didn’t even notice him take it. Apparently, Sam is too weak to do more than lie in the snow, but his hands are up and working the knife over the rope that binds his brother.

It’s slow. The rope is thick, Sam has almost no strength at all. Dean can’t see the progress and it’s driving hid crazy. He keeps trying to move his arms, hoping that something will finally give, but he can’t even tell if Sam’s trying anymore or if this is it and they are lost this close to their rescue.

The pain takes a while to register after Sam accidentally nicked Dean’s skin. It happens more and more often and Dean is pretty sure he’s bleeding from half a dozen small wounds on his hands and wrists now, but at least he knows Sam is still working and, honestly, he couldn’t care less about some cuts. He’d have Sam cut off his hands if he thought that would help.

Eventually (finally, finally), something gives and Dean’s hands are free. It’s only when he can move again that he realizes just how cold he’s gotten, but he doesn’t pay attention to it as he drags Sam into his arms with clumsy movement, before he wriggles out of his own, heavy, lined coat to wrap it around his brother whose fingers and toes are blue with cold, all the time babbling something that contains the words “It’s okay, I got you”, “You’re gonna be okay” and “Just hang on” more often than one sentence usually does.

He’s babbling, but that’s okay. Everybody babbles – even Cas does, right now. Dean hears his increasingly frantic voice telling him to cut the angel lose as well so he can help, get blankets and make a fire and everything, and yeah, he’s right, Dean should take the knife and take care of it, wouldn’t be thirty seconds even weak as he is. But he can’t bring himself to do anything else but pull his brother’s trembling body close and try to warm him against his own freezing one.

Eventually, though, he snaps out of it and his instincts are for once overruled by common sense. Sam still tugged against him he drags himself over to Cas and starts working on the bonds. They are bloody, Castiel’s wrists a mess. Not so different from Dean’s own wrists, but Cas is stronger than him and able to do a lot more damage to himself.

He scrambles over to Dean – to _Sam_ – the moment he can, frantically moving his hands over Sam’s barely covered body. Sam moves weakly, trembling so hard he’s almost seizing, and his eyes are fluttering shut. “No, stay awake!” Cas says with such authority Dean is surprised it’s not working. Sam blinks at his old friend for a few seconds, then his back arches and his eyes roll back and that’s it. He’s not dead, but there’s no way he’s going to be alive for much longer.

Neither is Dean, though he’ll live long enough to watch his brother die and then some. Sam’s neck and chest and thighs are smears with blood, his lips are blue, and why did the fucker of a vampire have to shred his fucking shoes? Then everything is kindly hidden from view as Cas throws blankets over him and Dean does his best to tuck them around him. A second later, Cas sets one of the flasks with blood to Sam’s parted lips, pours the liquid down his throat, but there isn’t that much left and most of it runs down Sam’s face anyway. He does swallow, though, once, and maybe that’s just enough, maybe that’s….

“Get the fuck away from him,” a female voice interrupts his thoughts. “Both of you. Hand’s off. That goes for you, too, Dean. Don’t fucking touch him.” Accompanying the voice are hands that shove Dean aside and other hands that take Sam out of his arms. He makes a distressed sound somewhere in the back of his throat that doesn’t sound like his own voice and tries to bat the hands away, not understanding. The hands resist; they gabble. If he had his gun, he’d be shooting people. But Sam’s gone and Dean couldn’t stop it. Even finally recognizing the voice as Jena’s doesn’t help him understand.

So he scrambles to his feet to get over there, push her away from Sam (What the fuck is she doing with his brother?), get everyone away from Sam (there are more people around, but they don’t matter, they don’t do anything but stand around and watch and they’re not trying to get Dean away from his brother anymore since they already did that) but his legs are like rubber and he falls into the snow. Gets up, would have fallen again if not for hands holding him, catching him. “Let her help, Dean,” a familiar voice says. (Castiel.) “We can’t save him. She can. Give her a chance.”

Jena. Help. Jena can help Sam. Jena can save Sam. Slowly, things register with Dean. Jena is here.

Where was Jena an hour ago?

Sam’s still lying in the snow, still tucked in all the blankets, but Jena is pushing them away as she moves her hands over his body with frantic movements, pressing them here and there, seemingly looking for something. She’s muttering under her breath. It doesn’t sound happy. But Cas said she’d help. But she looks worried.

Sam’s not moving anymore. He’s completely limp under her hands. (Maybe he died.)

Dean can’t even focus on the other people around. Demons or angels, someone Jena thought was convenient. They stand watching, and then someone steps forward and even Dean kneeling in the snow notices and recognizes him.

“You _can_ save him, right?” the man says in the smooth voice Dean remembers from their one, brief meeting so long ago. “Because I went through a lot of trouble for this, took a lot of personal risk, and the whole thing is moot if he dies now.”

“Don’t disturb me, then,” Jena snaps without looking at him. Dean can sense her anger. “If he dies, your biggest problem will be me, because then I have no further use for you. It was _you_ who held us up with your overcautious bargaining, so if Sam Winchester is now lost because of you, I will deliver you to my brother myself as a peace offering. And he will not kill you.”

“You’ve got just as much to lose as everyone else,” Crowley says, but sounds more like he’s simply unable to shut up before he’s had the last word – or at least was the last one speaking. He leaves Jena alone, though, and turns to look down at Dean with raised eyebrows. “Well, you look peachy, don’t you?” he observes. “Here. Maybe this can cheer you up.”

Something heavy hits the snow before Dean. He stares down at it and needs a little before he registers what it is: the severed head of the vampire who hurt Sam. Maybe the last of his kind. Maybe that’s genocide lying in a mess before Dean’s knees.

His brain is frozen. There are a million things he wants to say but all that comes over his lips is “I wanted to do that myself.”

“Tough luck, boy. There was a line, and I was in front of it. Guess I would’ve killed him anyway but like this I actually had a reason. On the other hand, if he hadn’t killed that guy over there” – Dean doesn’t need to look to know he’s nodding towards the headless corpse of the last remaining demon – “we’d never have found you in time.”

“And yet you needed hours to get here,” Castiel criticizes. “Did that henchman of yours need that long to smoke back to you? Or did you orchestrate this delay on purpose?”

“Watch what you’re saying, kitten.” Crowley throws the fallen angel a glare. “I’m not having a good day and you, as the only one in this setup, are entirely expendable.”

“What are you even doing here?” Cas asks, entirely unimpressed. “Why are you following us? To take Sam’s soul like those imbeciles tried who ran into us weeks ago?”

“I know of no imbeciles, though I do admit that the label fits almost all of my loyal subjects.” The loyal subject standing closest to him glares in his direction but is otherwise distracted by Jena and Sam.

“We killed them before they could report back to you.”

“Ah, so. Then you will understand that I have no idea what you are actually talking about.”

“Let me put it differently: Is it your plan to hide Sam Winchester’s soul in Hell so that Lucifer cannot find it?”

“Aah.” The king of the crossroads stretches the sound, leans back a little. “That.”

Dean doesn’t know what to make of all this. His mind is focused on Sam who still isn’t moving, and on Jena, but he’s listening, and he’s getting angry. So very angry, though showing signs of that anger is an effort his body doesn’t seem to be up to.

“We did discuss the idea for a while,” Crowley admits. “Eventually discarded it in favor of a better one. You can’t really hide anything in Hell that Lucifer won’t find – he’s the Devil, and all that. It’s a no-brainer. It would have stalled the inevitable, but not done anything but piss him off, in the end. Too bad some of the guys didn’t get the memo.”

“And what is that better plan you came up with?”

Dean is glad Cas is doing the talking, he really is – because he doesn’t particularly feel up to talking himself and he really, really wants to know.

“Her.” Crowley points to Jena, who doesn’t seem to be paying attention to anything they say. “Inspiration came to us in a somewhat unexpected from.” He looks at them, his eyes narrowed and showing a hint of calculating interest. “I take it you’re not privy to the plan, then?”

“We certainly didn’t know it would involve the likes of _you_ ,” Cas replies icily, obviously unwilling to admit just how clueless anyone but Jena is as to what is actually going on. Dean hopes for her sake that the idea to involve the demons was a spontaneous one that came to her after she had left them and not something she’s been planning all along. (He ignores the voice that whispers to him that not all that long ago he considered contacting Crowley for cooperation as well.)

“Shut up, everyone,” Jena suddenly orders. She sounds stressed and even Dean, who will never be her biggest fan, isn’t sure that she’s just trying to distract from the fact that she went to the demons without asking.

Or without informing them, at least. It’s not as if Jena-fucking-Gabriel ever asks for permission about anything.

At least Dean finds his voice again, if not his ability to stand. It’s crawling that he makes his way over to her and his brother. “You can help him, right? Tell me he’s not dying!”

“We need to go. It’s not safe here.”

“That’s not a fucking answer!”

“No? Is it answer enough that Sam will die in any case if we leave him out here in the snow any longer?” Jena slips her arms under Sam’s body and stands, lifting him effortlessly despite the fact that he is so much taller. There’s nothing but snow around them. The next town seems endlessly far away, they don’t have horses, they don’t have anything. Dean feels desperation wash over him and make his eyes water. He blinks, and Jena and Sam are gone.

Startled, he looks around, sees Crowely looking unimpressed, Castiel frowning, the other demons turning around themselves and shouting in surprise. A second later, Jena is back (alone), grabs Dean and Cas and then they are somewhere else.

 

-

 

Though it looks completely different, Dean knows at once that the place is just like the house they stayed in just after rescuing Sam: not real.

Safe. Or so he hopes.

It would feel safer to him if Jena hadn’t, just after dropping him and Cas, fucked off to grab Crowley. Because there is no better company than a demon who’s once trapped his brother in concrete and dumped him in the sea.

At least the other demons aren’t with them, which means that they… that _Jena_ will need Crowley, and Crowley specifically for something or other. She certainly didn’t take him along because she enjoys his company so much.

Then again, maybe that’s exactly the reason. They are both assholes and Jena hardly needs a sensible reason for anything she does.

For the moment, her focus is on Sam, though, and that reminds Dean painfully of those first days as well, when all of Gabriel’s not inconsiderable power was needed to keep his brother’s failing body alive. Now, once again, she spends most of the time sitting at Sam’s bedside, touching his forehead, his neck and his chest and frowning. And yet, things are different.

Where the first place was a small, run-down collection of rooms with bare light bulbs and tread-through carpets, this one is much bigger and cleaner. Tiled floors mark most of the rooms. There are lampshades, the lights are much brighter. The beds in the three bedrooms are bigger, as is the bathroom, and the kitchen actually has a plate and an oven. Even a fucking dishwasher, though it lacks in dishes.

The biggest improvement, at least where Dean is concerned, is the bottle of oxygen standing beside Sam’s bed and the mask over his face that helps him breathe. They really would have needed that before, when Sam was ill, weak, wrecked with fever and suffering from broken bones, internal injuries and infections. Why Jena couldn’t manage it back then Dean can only speculate on, but he guesses it was something to do with Gabriel having more power at his disposal right now, possibly because he didn’t come straight from a confrontation with Satan, or maybe because Sam isn’t quite as badly off and doesn’t need quite as much of the archangel’s power to stay alive.

One thing that stayed the same is the fact that there’s no door leading outside and all the windows are covered. The bright lamps almost seem like daylight, though, (real daylight, shining from a blue sky, not this dusty orange twilight that passes for a bright day nowadays) and the air is a lot fresher, as if a window were open all the time.

The first day passes without Dean paying much attention to anything but the stuff that relates directly to his brother. Sam doesn’t wake up, but it’s not the coma-like unconsciousness of times past. He’s tossing, whimpering and moaning with nightmares, and coughing up a lung every now and then, sprinkling the transparent oxygen mask with little droplets of blood. Altogether, he’s a little better than he has been the first time, but Dean still fears for his life.

His worry is justified, if Jena’s frustrated focus is anything to go by. Only after a day or so does she get up and leave Sam, not offering any comment beyond, “He should wake up soon.”

Well, that’s great. It really is – Dean wasn’t sure he’d see Sam open his eyes ever again, so he’s pretty excited about that.  But he also has a lot of questions, and now there’s no longer a risk of distracting Jena from saving Sam’s life seems to be a good moment to ask them.

So Dean presses a soft kiss to his brother’s hot forehead, whispers, “I’ll be back,” and goes to look for her.

Only, doesn’t find her. At least not before Castiel finds him, and that happens basically the moment he steps out of Sam’s bedroom. Suddenly, the fallen angel is there, his hand on Dean’s shoulder to push him back into the room and Dean hasn’t noticed him showing up, so either he’s gaining back his angelic abilities or Dean needs to pay better attention.

“What’s going on?” he asks, his voice strangely rough. Other than whispering to Sam, he hasn’t spoken much since coming here. “I need to talk to Jena.”

“So do I. You won’t find her.”

“Why not?”

“Because she doesn’t want to be found.”

It doesn’t make sense. She just left. “But I need to talk to her.”

“You need sleep. Here, drink this.”

A bottle materializes in Dean’s hand; he doesn’t remember taking it. “What’s that?”

“Juice. Drink it. Then sleep.”

“I don’t need sleep,” Dean insists before setting the bottle to his lips and drinking all of it in one go. He is kind of thirsty. He’s also kind of hungry, hasn’t eaten since coming here. But the thought of food makes him sick. Actually, he’s feeling a little sick all over, but not so much it would be worth mentioning. Didn’t even realize it until now.

“Yes, you do. You should have gone to sleep ages ago. In fact, you should have passed out ages ago.”

Somehow, they are standing beside the bed. Cas can’t want Dean to sleep here, though, since Sam is already lying in it. But there’s enough room to sit on the edge and take a deep breath.

Cas takes the empty bottle out of his hands and places it on the bedside table, where more empty bottles are already standing. Dean vaguely remembers Cas coming into the room in uneven intervals and making him drink. He complied to make him go away.

Only now does it really register, if only because Cas is standing quite determinedly in his way and quite determinedly filling his field of vision. “You’re not my mother.”

“And I don’t intend to breast-feed you,” Cas replies with a perfectly straight face. “I will, however, feed you fruit and red meat once you have woken up. You have neglected your body’s needs for too long.”

“I neglected nothing. And I don’t need any of that. I have to find Jena, she’s got to… to…” Dean blinks, shakes his head to clear it as the thought escapes him. But his head is pounding and the movement makes it worse. “I’m not leaving Sammy.”

“The bed is big enough. You can sleep beside him. Now lie down, you need rest.”

“No, I…”

“Yes, Dean.” Cas sounds at the same time patient, understanding, and slightly irritated. Dean can’t fathom how he does it – it’s such a parent voice. Maybe Cas thinks he’s his mother after all. Maybe he’ll sing him a song. “You lost a lot of blood, remember?” the fallen angel reminds him. “Give your body a chance to recover. I should have taken care of you before, but it seemed unlikely that you’d find any rest while Sam was still in danger.”

“Damn straight,” Dean mutters. “Does that mean he’s safe now?”

“He’ll wake up. Before then, get rest. So you can be there for him when he returns to us."

That doesn’t sound too bad. Dean is tired after all, and while this argument has been used on him far too often, he can’t deny that it’s valid. Sammy will need him. “You’ll wake me when he wakes up, right?” he asks even as he allows Cas to gently press him down onto the bed. (It really _is_ big, almost a double bed, and Sam barely needs half of it.)

“Of course,” Cas promises with a smile in his voice. Dean accepts that as enough, turns towards his brother and allows his eyes to close. He barely notices the covers being draped over him, barely hears the words, “Sleep well, my friend,” before he sinks into a dreamless sleep.

 

-

 

When he wakes up, it’s with a start to a darkened room. One moment to the next, Dean sits upright, his heart pounding, and doesn’t understand why the room unsettles him. It’s not really dark. The lights are off, but there’s twilight coming in, like the light of the evening sun filtered by the blinds before the window. But there are no blinds that could let through any light and then Dean realizes that the lamps in the ceilings are simply set to a dimmer setting and he’s not sure why he ever thought it was anything but this.

For a second, he feels disoriented and sick. The silence is deafening.

But just as it’s not really dark, it’s not really silent. There’s soft breathing to his right and Dean’s heart calms down a little bit when he turns and sees Sam beside him, still asleep, his breath fogging up the mask over his face ever so slightly with each exhale. He’s stirred some, but apparently he didn’t wake. Cas would have woken Dean.

But then, how could he have woken him if he isn’t fucking here?

Well. Maybe he just got out for a minute to grab a snack. Dean could forgive that. Maybe he found Jena and is confronting her about her secrecy and Crowley and everything right now. Dean would not be able to forgive that. He wants to be there when that happens. The two Children of Heaven are not going to conspire and keep stuff from him again in all their good intentions and conviction that he can’t fucking handle the truth.

So Dean kicks back the covers, swings his legs off the bed and nearly steps on Cas.

Okay, he hasn’t made his mind up yet about whether or not he can forgive Cas for lying on the floor beside the bed.

“You’re awake,” Castiel greets him, because he’s not even sleeping. He’s just lying on the fucking floor for no goddamn reason.

“What the fuck, Cas?” Dean growls. “Why are you on the floor?”

“My back hurt.”

“So you lay down on the floor?”

“It’s hard. That’s quite pleasant.”

Dean considers that. “Why are you lying on this side? You could keep better check on Sam on his side.”

“This isn’t intended as a permanent position. I only need a minute.”

Dean looks around the large room full of unoccupied floor. “Why here of all places?”

“I happened to become aware of the pain when I was checking on you so I lay down here. I didn’t expect a discussion to stem from it.”

“Okay. Nevermind.” A thought crawls into Dean’s sluggish, overextended brain. “You were checking on me?”

Cas sits up and slowly climbs to his feet. “I was.”

“Why?”

“Because you’re my friend.” That blank stare that always hits Dean when Cas doesn’t understand why he would even ask. Nice to know he’s still got that.

“Well. That’s nice. I mean, thanks.” Dean coughs, looks over to his brother. “Whatever. I mean. How am I doing? Gonna live?”

“Most likely. You look alive to me.”

“Yeah, I don’t get it either. How’s Sam? He still hasn’t woken up? How long did I sleep? Feels like-”

“Ten hours,” Cas interrupts him with a number that’s only slightly lower that the totally exaggerated one Dean had in mind. “Sam didn’t yet wake up, but his fever has fallen and his sleep has been…quiet, for the last five hours.”

“Great. That’s great. Thanks.” Dean’s not even sure what he’s thanking him for. “Did you get any sleep?”

“I didn’t attempt to.”

“Do you want to? Now would be a good time.”

“I don’t think it is.” Cas stops, half turned away, as if he just remembered something. “And I’m not tired. I will get you the food I promised.”

“The food you insisted on,” Dean corrects, because no one can claim he forces anyone to make him a sandwich. “The food you are forcing down my throat.”

“As opposed to the food I will hand you so you can eat it yourself in a dignified manner? If you insist.”

“You know, you developed a kinda disturbing sense of humor.” Especially since Dean can never be entirely sure if he’s really joking.

True to form, Cas doesn’t say anything to elevate his concerns before turning and walking out of the room with a faint smile.

 

-

 

Ten minutes later Dean has wolfed down a steak in a not entirely dignified manner and is drowning his second glass of unidentifiable green juice. It tastes vaguely of bananas but it’s green and Dean isn’t thinking about it. Why couldn’t they have lived like this all the time in the past few months? It definitely beats sleeping in caves and eating twigs every day.

When he asks Cas, who watches him eat with faint amusement, he’s told that for one, maintaining this kind of pocket-reality costs more energy than Jena can bring up permanently now she’s largely cut off from Heaven, and besides, here they can rest but they can’t do anything else. This place means stagnation, and Jena didn’t join their fight just so they could live out their lives in peace.

Which wouldn’t happen anyway, with Sam not aging but also never fully recovering from his illnesses.

It’s all theoretical, anyway, because it’s not an option, no matter how much Dean would like to keep his brother safely locked away in a place like this forever.

Cas himself eats a little as well, but it’s not much. Dean wonders if he’s eaten before, if he’s slept, or if he was keeping vigil over both him and Sam all the time. He looks tired, but also more relaxed than in a long time.

It changes the moment Sam moans and arches off the bed, his arms twitching spastically. In a heartbeat both Dean and Cas are with him, holding him down, checking his temperature (too high) and his pulse (raging).

“What’s wrong?” Dean asks, panicking, over his brother’s desperate moans. “I thought he was doing better?”

Cas doesn’t answer. His face is a closed-off mask of concentration. He looks unhappy but, as Dean notices with a sinking feeling in his stomach, not surprised.

After a minute or so, Sam goes limps for a second before turning onto his side and curling up, whimpering softly. He blinks once or twice, causing tears to run down his face, so he’s at least half awake, but Dean’s pretty sure he’s not actually _aware_. He drags his own body a little closer to his brother’s and Sam pushes his face against his hip and falls still. Dean, wrapping an arm around his shoulders, can feel him tremble.

“Where’s Jena?” he asks once again, this time through clenched teeth, shaking with anger and worry. Cas just sighs and adjusts the oxygen mask to sit smoothly on Sammy’s face after it has been displaced by his struggle.

“She’s recovering her strength to keep this up as long as necessary,” he finally explains, though if that’s a fact or speculation, Dean doesn’t know. And it’s not good enough. She can help Sam, and so she has to do it. She has to fucking get her ass here _now_.

“Maybe I can be of help,” a new voice rings from the direction of the door. Dean looks up in shock and sees the demon Crowley in the doorway, leaning against the frame and looking entirely too unconcerned with anything. He’s left them alone so far, was probably bored by Jena fighting for Sam’s life, and Dean more or less forgot he was with them due to more pressing concerns.

But Crowley, standing less that twenty feet away from where his brother is lying helplessly, that counts as a pressing concern. Before Dean can do something about it, however, Cas gets to his feet and if he were a cat, his fur would be puffy and he’d hiss.

He’s human-shaped, though, and he snaps, “Get out, Demon! You’re not welcome here.”

“Thing about being a demon, you’re rarely welcome anywhere,” Crowley replies completely unimpressed. “Except, of course, if there is something someone wants really badly and you’re the only one who can provide it. You’d be amazed how quickly priorities change, then.” He stops for a second, makes a face as if he just remembered something. “But then, you know that, don’t you? Tell me, Dean, how did you enjoy your visit in the realm of the burned and screaming? I always regretted not visiting you, but then, there was always something more important to do. Like keeping an eye on that sweet brother of yours who kept killing my crossroad staff, and that got really annoying after a while. You have no idea how hard it is to find reliable lackeys these days.”

“So you know stuff,” Dean notes dryly. “Congratulations. Quite an achievement considering you’re unable to process the words just said to you. Get out, or we’ll make you.”

“I’d like to see you try,” Crowley says, and he sounds like he really means it. “It would be entertaining – I’d even go so far as to say it would be a highlight in my boring days. Before I wipe the floor with you, though, I feel I should point out to you that you, of all people, should not be accusing others of not listening. You don’t actually want me to go.”

“We don’t want anything from you,” Cas says matter-of-factly.

“Not even if I could help Sammy there?”

“His name is Sam.” The words come automatically to Dean. People have been calling Sam Sammy far too often. The wrong people. All the wrong people. Dean is the only one allowed to do that. Cas never did. “And why do you think you could possibly accomplish what an archangel can’t?”

“Can’t? Or doesn’t see the point in?” The demon makes a casual gesture, wiping away any possible reply. “Yeah, I know. Demon, evil, tries to introduce doubt to the close-knit community. Never mind that now. Never mind that – obviously – Gabriel never told you what he’s actually planning to do. Just consider that I have an interest in _Sam_ over there being alive and well enough to beat the Devil.”

“What can you actually do? Especially considering that I will cut off your hands if you touch him.”

“Oh, please. You need me, else I wouldn’t be here. And really, isn’t it obvious? Sam is addicted to demon blood. I am a demon, and a powerful one, if I may say so myself. Under these special circumstances, I am willing to offer a few drops of my precious blood – and believe me when I say that’s not an offer I make for just anyone.”

“We did feed him blood,” Cas points out. “He’s good.”

“Mine’s better. And he’s anything but ‘good’.”

Dean tightens his hold on his brother’s shoulder. Yeah, Sam’s not so great right now. But he’s been worse and pulled through. He’s going to do it now, without them having to make depths with the fucking King of the Crossroads.

“Fuck off,” he says. “We don’t need you.”

“Oh, don’t you? I guess you don’t. Because you deciding that Sam doesn’t need demon blood has been going to well for him before, hasn’t it?”

Damn that asshole, how does he even know that? Jena must have told him, for whatever reason, that bitch.

Sam suddenly whimpers. He coughs, hard, and then goes completely limp. Cas quickly checks his pulse and Dean can see his shoulders sag in relive.

“His heart is beating evenly, now,” he says by way of explanation. “He’s just sleeping, getting real rest. His fever should break soon enough.”

So much for that. Dean throws Crowley a glance that’s half triumphing and half detesting.

Crowley merely shrugs. “You’ll need me soon enough. And you’ll know where to find me. Really, it’s a special offer. I don’t even want anything in return.”

“Like hell you don’t. You demons are clinically incapable of doing anything without demanding a price.”

“Let be put it this way, then: By having him drink my blood, I’m already getting what I want: Sam Winchester, alive and strong enough to beat Satan.”

Which leads back to the reason Crowley is here in the first place. “What are you planning? You do have a way to fight Lucifer, right? Jena needs you for some reason, you wouldn’t be here otherwise. You wouldn’t even be _alive_ otherwise.”

“Correct,” Crowley confirms with flourish. “And that’s exactly where things become nasty again. You see, I have something that you need, but the moment I give it to you, I’m going to get killed. No illusions there – it’s what _I_ would do. So we have a bit of a pat situation here.” He actually seems kind of satisfied with that.

“You need Sam for your plan.” It still doesn’t make Dean happy. Nothing good can possibly come from it and he wonders if Sam will have anything even resembling a choice in this matter.

Not that it would change anything. If they tell Sam that he, and only he, had the opportunity to save everyone, his answer is unlikely to be No.

“That can’t possibly come as a surprise.”

“What are you planning?” Cas asks. He’s risen off the edge of the bed, is standing between Crowley and Sam, and when the demon detaches himself from the doorframe and starts walking towards him, Cas lifts his (empty) hands and promises, “If you touch Sam or even come near him, I will cut off your arms and legs. I assume you will not need them to give us what we need.”

In response, Crowley rises his hands and stops in his tracks. “Actually, I don’t. It’s a good tip. But keep in mind, penguin, that I can always leave this body, so your threat isn’t that much of one. Also, you don’t have the information you need yet, and I can always reconsider.”

“What are you planning?” Cas asks again. “Remember that as long as you are in this place, you cannot leave your host body. You cannot teleport away. You cannot escape should we decide you’re trying our patience too much.”

It gets him an arrogant smile. “You’re hardly the most dangerous person in this room,” he points out. “A direct fight? My bets are on me.”

The grim smile Cas gives him sends a shiver down even Dean’s spine. “Try me.”

“You’re no fun to play with,” the demon waves away the building tension, just like that, as if he simply got bored with it. “Drawing the ‘Look, I’m an overprotective psychopath!’ card is really old.”

“Good thing we’re with Mr. Witty here,” Dean states, dripping sarcasm. “Are you going to answer the question or do we have to see what happens if we try an exorcism in this place?”

“Actually, I’m surprised you don’t know what’s up yet. The plan is simple enough, wouldn’t know why your feathered friend hasn’t introduced it to you yet.”

“In case you haven’t noticed, we were kind of busy with other stuff since our reunion.”

“Oh, right. I forgot. As long as there is something wrong with Sammy, you can’t actually focus on anything else. Like, I don’t know, asking questions about the future of the planet. Stuff like that.”

“You know? That’s it.” Dean opens his mouth, starts with the exorcism, and that does actually have an effect, will you look at that, because the demon lifts his hands in a gesture of surrender and says, “Wait, wait! Calm down. You want to know what’s going to happen? We’ll shove Lucifer down into his cage and slam down the lid. Weld the lock, destroy the hatch, you get the drift. Generally make sure he’s not getting out again.”

“Sounds easy,” Dean remarks. “Why are you telling us this?”

“Because I’m very, very bored.”

Sounds plausible enough.

“How exactly do you plan on trapping Lucifer?” Cas asks, his voice tight.

“Well. That’s where you need me. Because you see – or maybe you don’t, because you obviously have no idea – there are those nasty horsemen of the apocalypse who have been running around being annoying for a while. Really, no fun to be around at all. Except War, perhaps. There was a man after my own heart.”

“As a matter of fact, we do know that,” Dean interrupts him. “We defeated War. Cut his stupid ring right off his finger. Same with Famine.” Another happy memory: Sam with blood smeared around his mouth and a bleeding nose, looking guilty and ashamed after defeating a frigging Horseman and Dean himself too fucked-up and desperate to feel anything but disappointment at the sight, like Sam had just let him, personally and deliberately, down again, as opposed to feeling – oh, you know, proud or something. Or sorry. As he fucking should have.

Just like he shouldn’t have fucking ran away during the detox.

“Right,” Crowley’s voice cuts through his thoughts. “Though defeated is so strong a word. They’re still around, and eventually, when they have licked their wounds, they’ll even be kicking again. Their rings are a nice crutch for their powers, but not actually necessary. The real purpose of those, actually, is another one.”

Now it’s getting interesting. “We don’t have the rings anymore,” Dean has to admit. Then he throws a look in Cas’ direction. “Or do we?”

“No. They were lost long ago.” Along with everything else. “Did the horsemen reclaim them?”

“As a matter of fact, they didn’t. Your friend Gabriel did.”

Oh, really now. “When?” Dean tries to imagine what happened to them, when they were lost, how long they were lying around in some basement or in a pile a rubble or the trunk of a car that has long since rusted away to nothing before Jena came along and picked them up.

“We didn’t go into detail when sharing stories, but my guess would be right after you lost them.” There is a smug smile on Crowley’s face, indicating he knows very well how unexpected his words are. “After all, he knew exactly that those are the key to defeating Lucifer.”

“…Oh.” The thing is, it’s not really unexpected. After all, Gabriel has been at the sidelines of the war for a very long time before finally getting involved. Maybe he picked up the rings to make sure no one could use them against his brother; more likely he did it in case he’d need them someday. “If she already has them, then what exactly does she need you for?”

“She only has the two you collected. I have the other ones.”

“Why?”

Castiel’s question seems to confuse the demon. “’Why’?”

“Why did you get the rings? Facing off a horseman is dangerous. You wouldn’t take the risk unless you desperately needed them.”

“One hears things as King of the Crossroads, even in exile. I knew the rings were the key to Lucifer’s cage and figured securing them wouldn’t be such a bad idea – as leverage, if nothing else.” Crowley leans back raising an eyebrow. “And here I am. I do admit, getting Pesitlence’s rings was a bit of a lucky coincidence. You’re not the only angel not on board with the apocalypse. Two others tried to take care of dear Pesty not long after he released the Croatoan virus, and while he managed to banish them, they’d already hurt him badly. I just had to stroll in there and cut off his finger. He’s licking his wounds right now – shouldn’t come after me for another five hundred years, give or take.”

“And Death? Somehow I doubt it was that easy.”

“As a matter of fact, it as even easier. I didn’t even have to come to him, he came to me.”

“Not to kill you off?”

“Please. Been dead for centuries. We’re, like, old friends, except, of course, I hardly needed a guide when the hellhounds came to drag me to Hell. Guess you know the feeling.” This time, Crowley doesn’t waste any more breath jabbing at Dean. “Lucifer has the horsemen by the balls. They don’t actually get a say in what they have to do for him, and Death is having issues with that. And I’m telling you, he’s one scary motherfucker. I wouldn’t want him to have issues with _me_. So when he makes you an offer, you’d be better off to take it."

“He just gave you his ring,” Dean realizes.

“Quite right. I admit I wasn’t too keen on meeting him in person, but he doesn’t really take well to declining an invitation. So he gave me his ring and told me how to use them, provided I got the whole set.”

“So you sought out Jena to get the other ones and fight Lucifer?” Dean asks doubtfully. Crowley looks at him with an expression of disgusted terror.

“Oh hell, no! Why would I want to do that? That’s a suicide mission. But I knew sooner or later the archangel holding the other rings would come to me. There must have been a reason for Death to come now, of all times, I thought, and when I heard that the chess piece called Sam Winchester had returned to the board, it was clear that things would go down soon.”

“Why did you send your demons after us, then?”

“To make sure no one got Sammy before me, of course. It was all in your best interest, really. Imagine someone had taken him to Lucifer – bad for you, bad for him, bad for me. Bad all around. I only meant to protect you.”

“Your lackeys tried to kill us more than once!”

“That’s because they are imbeciles. Hence me taking care of things personally.”

That’s anything but convincing. “So Gabriel just came to you? And you just plan on handing over the rings?”

“In a manner of speaking. I plan, in fact, to use those rings and the knowledge on how to open the cage as a health-insurance. There’s no reason to trust an angel not to kill you as soon as he got what he needs from you.”

“Funny words coming from a demon,” Dean snarls. “What does Sam have to do with all of this? You open the cage, you shove Lucifer in. As far as I’m concerned, you may feel free to do that far, far away from my brother.”

That’s how it should be. That’s what would make sense based on the information Dean has. Lucifer needs Sam, so they should make sure to keep him away from his vessel, not throw it at him. Jena should have taken the rings and taken care of her brother as quickly as possible. Instead she came back to collect Sam and is now investing time and effort to heal him. The indication doesn’t sit well with Dean at all.

He shares a quick look with Cas and sees the apprehension he’s feeling reflected on the fallen angel’s face.

“The rings enable us to open and close the cage,” Jena’s voice suddenly rings through the room. Dean looks up in surprise, but it’s another second before her slight frame appear in the open doorway. “They won’t do anything to actually get my dear brother in there. For that, we need Sam. He’s the only one who’ll have the faintest chance of pushing him in.”

“ _Sam?_ ” Dean asks incredulously. “You’re a fucking archangel and you’re telling me that my little brother who _can’t even breathe properly right now_ is the only one who can defeat the Devil? And you expect me to buy that bullshit?”

“I never said anything about defeating him.” Jena regards him coolly. “Sam doesn’t stand a snowball’s chance in a direct confrontation. But he’s the only one Lucifer won’t want to destroy completely, and that’s limiting him. All it takes is one second, one tiny moment of having the upper hand – and of course, it helps if he manages to catch Lucy unaware. So Sam distracts him, we open the cage, Sam pushes him in, and that’s it.”

“Oh, so no problem at all,” Dean says with biting sarcasm. “Where’s the catch?”

“To get even that millisecond of a chance, Sam will need to be stronger than he is right now.”

It takes Dean a second or two to understand what Jena means, because his brain simply refuses to accept it. Of course Sam will need to be stronger, is his first thought, he can’t fucking breathe. Then he realizes that she’s not talking about his health.

His first impulse is to yell at her and forbid what she is planning. But that didn’t work out the last time he tried and he is well aware that this is the only chance they have – and that it’s not actually his choice to make.

He knows what Sam will choose.

“How much?” he asks between clenched teeth.

“Gallons,” she replies without batting an eye. “He’ll need all the demon blood he can possibly ingest to gain access to the full extent of his powers.”

Dean closes his eyes, fighting the wave of desperation and denial even before Cas says, “The withdrawal will kill him.”

“Probably. Without help, it will, if the fight doesn’t. But he’ll just be dead. No more Lucifer waiting for him.”

“That’s all you care about, right?” Dean spits, unable to hold back his impotent anger. “Maybe Lucifer won’t get him, but Sam will still go to Hell because Heaven _won’t fucking have him_!”

“If you absolutely need to hear it, yes, that is all I care about. But I also promised I would make sure Sam goes to Heaven after he died – _should_ he die. As it happens, I’ll probably be able to save him and if you ask nicely I will even do it.”

“You weren’t able to spare him the withdrawal last time.”

“Next time the circumstances will be different. The apocalypse will be over and I can fully return to Heaven. It probably won’t be pretty, but Sam’s chances aren’t bad. The withdrawal won’t be the biggest problem. Not having Lucifer outright kill him will be more difficult. He’ll try, and he easily can, so there’s not a large window of opportunity.” Jena’s eyes flicker over to where Sam is lying curled up and unconscious. “But we will take care of the details when the time comes. For now we will gather our strength.”

“Colour me excited.” Crowley pushes himself off the wall, helping Jena to get away with cutting off the conversation at this point even though there’s a lot of stuff Dean still wants to say. Loudly. “I’ll just go back to my room and hope you all can refrain from killing me long enough to get this over with.”

“Don’t worry,” Jena says in a frighteningly friendly manner, clapping his shoulder as he passes her. “We need you, after all.”

It doesn’t sound reassuring at all. In fact, between Cas’ threat to rip out Crowley’s limbs and Jena’s smile, Dean would have chosen the limbs.

Crowley looks like he’d generally agree.

 

-

 

After her brief appearance for more or less useful information, Jena disappears again, and Dean doesn’t feel like talking to her any more. Crowley fades off into the background, wisely not entering Sam’s room anymore, and Dean hardly ever leaves it, so they never meet. It works well for Dean. A part of him hopes that in the meantime, the demon dies of boredom.

Cas stays with Dean and Sam. He looks tired, beat, but he doesn’t lie down. Dean wants to make him, wants him to get some rest, get his strength back up, because the next time either Crowley or Jena show up, he wants his friend ready and functioning and not a walking zombie in his back, but also because the silence between then stretches long and uncomfortable and full of things neither of them wants to say.

“You should at least eat something,” Dean eventually says, after a long time.

Cas looks at him tiredly, his fingers absentmindedly running over the back of Sam’s hand. “I’m not hungry.”

“Neither was I, and yet you made me eat.”

“Sam used to drink much more blood than he does now, you know.”

Dean closes his eyes. He doesn’t want to have this conversation.

“There were times when we would fight demons almost daily, so there was no shortage of blood. Also, Sam needed to keep up his level of power to be effective against them.”

“He’s not a fucking weapon.”

“He was. He made himself one.”

“And you let him.” No, this is wrong. This is not how they are supposed to be, but Dean can’t keep himself from talking.

Cas looks hurt but accepts the words. He doesn’t shoot back that Dean left him no other choice and that makes him the better person.

“What I want you to understand is that Sam is used to this kind of withdrawal. He’s been through it before. In the beginning he would only drink the blood if his powers were needed. In between, he didn’t use, going through detox every time.”

In the beginning. When Sam still tried to preserve his humanity, before he sacrificed the person he was and all his needs in order to become what was needed. “So you’re telling me he can survive it? We’re talking gallons here! You couldn’t safely get him off a normal level.”

“I’m telling you that Sam knows what he is getting into. And when Gabriel says he can help, we will have to trust him on that. What you have to understand…” Cas takes a deep breath, obviously not liking what he is about to say. “What you need to understand is that either way, Sam’s survival is going to be a bonus. It’s not a directive, not something we can take into consideration.”

“Fuck you,” Dean growls, only to add a second later, “I know that.”

“However, I will do my best to make sure Sam will come out of this alive.” Cas’ voice sounds softer now. “I don’t want him to suffer and I don’t want him to die. But before he can survive the withdrawal, he will have to survive the battle with Lucifer, or all will have been in vain.”

“And for that we need the blood, I fucking know that.” Sam, on the bed, straightens a little, rolls onto his back. He doesn’t look dead or at least comatose anymore, will wake up soon to meet the possibly last days of his life. “But does it have to be Crowley’s? Of all people?”

“Crowley is here.” Cas shrugs. “And he’s powerful. We will need either a powerful demon, or at least three mediocre ones whom Sam will have to completely drain. This is more convenient. If it comforts you, it will be unpleasant for Crowley.”

“Does that comfort _you_?”

“It does.”

Yeah, probably. Dean remembers what Cas told him about the things Crowley and his lackeys have done to Sam in order to keep him out of Lucifer’s clutches, and, okay, if the walking pile of shit ever comes near his brother again, Dean will bleed him out personally, and summon Death to ask him in person what to do with those rings. Crowley isn’t as unexpendable as he likes to believe.

With a sigh, Dean lets himself fall back onto the mattress. He stares at the high, white ceiling for a long time before he says, “Tell me something good, Cas. Tell me about someone Sam saved using his powers.”

Cas doesn’t answer for a long time and Dean closes his eyes, feeling defeated. Of course Cas can’t come up with anyone. There were so many people, so many strangers who meant nothing to him. His fight was against the Devil, not for the humans they happened to meet along the way. He never even knew their names. Why would he bother to ask?

“There was a girl called Lorna once, in the early years,” Cas says. “She was twelve. Sam saved her not from a demon but a werewolf, using his powers to fend it off. Years later, we met her daughter…”


	18. Chapter 18

The light is different when Dean wakes up. Instead of the bright light from the lamps in the ceiling that sometimes reminds him so much of real, bright daylight it hurts it’s dimmer, more like what daylight is like now. To Dean, it feels like waking up at dusk after sleeping away the afternoon. It wouldn’t be an unpleasant feeling if not for the fact that he has no sense of time here and might have slept for a year.

And it’s so very quiet.

Dean’s joints are aching as he sits up. He never meant to go to sleep but it happened and now here he is, feeling like he just woke from a sleep so deep a bomb going off couldn’t have woken him. It’s unsettling. Anything might have happened.

But as it turns out, the only thing to happen was Sam waking up. He turns his head when Dean moves and smiles at him from underneath his oxygen mask, and Dean’s own breath stops and his eyes moisten. “Hey,” he says, leans down to run his hand through Sam’s hair. “How are you doing?”

Sam tries to answer, reaches for the mask to remove it, but Dean halts his hand. “Rhetorical question, buddy. I can see how you are doing. That stays on. If you got anything to say to me, you may nod or shake your head. Are you in pain?”

Sam doesn’t nod or shake anything. Instead he lifts his hands and shows Dean his middle finger.

(He’s going to die soon. Jena and Crowley will kill him with their stupid plan.)

Sam doesn’t look too tired, so Dean doesn’t attempt to make him sleep again, intending instead to enjoy the moment of his brother being awake and for all appearances not in too much pain. “You wouldn’t happen to have any idea where Cas is, would you?”

In response, Sam lifts his other hand and points downwards, to the floor beside his bed. With a sigh, Dean crawls off, walks over to take a look and returns to where he’s been. “I don’t know what it is with him and sleeping on the floor. Was he still awake when you woke up?” Because if he was, Dean owes him a kick in the ass for not waking him, and right now Cas’ ass is very defenceless.

The reply is a vague motion of Sam’s hand. So Cas was awake but not very much so, probably in the process of falling off the bed. Dean will have to decide if that counts as mitigating circumstances.

“Jena been here?”

This gets him a nod. Dean resists the urge to growl. Of course she was here. Probably appeared the moment Sam opened his eyes and didn’t think of waking Dean.

He’s losing precious time here. “Did she say anything?”

This time Sam rolls his eyes at him and manages to push the mask off his face before Dean can stop him. “Checked me over. Told me I was fine,” he whispers, the hoarse scratch in his throat part of the reason why speaking is bad.

“Right, you look like a spring day. What else did she say?”

“What else was she supposed to tell me?”

So no mention of Crowley? That’s fine by Dean. Sam doesn’t have to know the demon is here, and should the guy come into this room, well, then Dean will just have to kill him. “Nothing in particular. Where we are would be useful information.”

“Dean.” Sam manages a glare and starts coughing. The mask goes back on at once.

“See? This, right here, is the reason why you should shut up,” Dean scolds, pressing the mask down without mercy.

Sam glares at him, convinced that there’s something Dean is keeping from him. Well, there is. Dean isn’t going to change that right now, though. In fact, he’ll keep on keeping things from Sam until he no longer can.

His hands roam his brother’s face and neck, feeling his temperature, his pulse. Sam’s heart is beating a little fast, his temperature almost normal. His breath is rattling in his lungs ever so softly but that’s old news and not something that’s likely to change anytime soon. Altogether, Sam’s fine, if very weak. As fine as he can be, anyway, after having been beaten up, drained, and raped by a vampire in the snow.

“Jena found a way to defeat Lucifer,” Dean says without meaning to, and Sam’s face lights up, it fucking _lights up_ like his brother just told him the best thing ever and Dean fucking hates everything.

 

-

 

Of course, after Dean told him, Sam wants to know everything. Dean has to press the mask down onto his face with more force than he would have liked and ignore his muffled voice and promise that he doesn’t actually know any details, except, “You don’t have to die to do this, Sammy. And I’m not even going to pretend I didn’t know that you were fully prepared for that, so sorry to disappoint you, but you’re going to live through it. Because if you don’t, if you die and if you dare to go to fucking Hell, I promise I’ll be right there with you, I’ll follow wherever you go so if you love me you’d damn well better survive this!”

That makes Sam look at him wide eyed and a little helpless and awed and what the hell is Dean supposed to do with that expression? Then Sam looks away, turns his face away from Dean, but Dean sees his eyes tear up anyway. So Sam doesn’t think he’s going to survive no matter what Dean tells him and he _still_ looked happy at the prospect of facing off with Lucifer. Just great. Dean’s gonna kill him himself one of these days, before there’s nothing left of his heart to be broken.

Dean’s little speech did more than make Sam cry, though. It also woke Cas, who sits upright with a groan, turns his head and looks right into Sam’s teary face. His eyes snap up to Dean and he glares. “What did you do?”

“I told him he’s not going to die,” Dean snaps back, not in the mood to take any blame here. “Apparently that’s too depressing to handle.”

Cas’s eyes flicker back to Sam’s and while Dean can’t see his brother’s face from his angle, he can tell that they are sharing a meaningful look, communication about something Dean isn’t privy to. Well, fuck them both. Sam isn’t going to die (alone), and he’ll just have to deal with that.

After a few seconds Cas pushes himself to his knees, leans in to kiss Sam’s temple, and rises to his feet, stretching.

“Slept well?” Dean asks coolly. “You know, I think this place has at least five beds standing around.”

“That would be overkill,” Cas replies unimpressed. “We are only four people.”

So he agrees about not letting Sam know about Crowley. That’s something at least.

After that, Cas leaves to get them some food while Dean strokes Sam’s hair, wills him to feel content and go back to sleep and himself to not feel angry and desperate. Cas comes back, he and Dean eat, and then Dean leaves for the bathroom. When he comes back, Sam is asleep and Cas is gone, to take some time to be on his own or to avoid having to talk to Dean. Dean sighs, leans back against the head of the bed and wishes for something to read.

 

-

 

Jena continues to keep her presence to a bare minimum for whatever reason and Crowley continues to keep to himself – only when Dean is in the kitchen does he sometimes hear the demon sing, and that’s pretty disturbing, all things considered. At least his voice doesn’t carry to Sam’s room, allowing them to keep his presence secret a little longer.

Except they soon enough have to find out that their brilliant plan of just not mentioning the demon in their middle doesn’t actually work.

Unsurprisingly, Sam doesn’t stay in bed all the time. He gets stronger, his breathing gets better. Little trips of Dean or Cas carrying him to the bathroom turn into them supporting his weight as he stumbles around and tries to get his limbs to work again. It reminds Deon of the time in the first safe house, just days before they had to leave, but it also reminds him of all the times before when Sam had been hurt bad enough to need a long recovery period.

(The first time, he hadn’t even been hurt on a hunt. He was seven, had gotten into a fight with an older kid at their school of the week and the kid had pushed him through a window. Dad hadn’t been there, so it was Dean who was called out of his own class and sat by Sam’s side in the hospital and tried to comfort him when he was weeping with pain. Eventually John had returned, and Dean had never before seen him so upset. He’d stayed for weeks afterwards, longer than Dean was used to, and did all he could to help his little son regain his strength and mobility. Dean still remembers his large arms wrapped around Sammy’s small body as he told him that yes, he could walk, he just had to try, and dad wouldn’t let him fall if he stumbled. Later he had left that job to Dean when a hunt had come up that he absolutely couldn’t not take, and Sam had clung to his brother when they practiced walking, not trusting his own legs to carry him but trusting Dean.)

Eventually, Sam is strong enough to move on his own, for a short time, wandering in circles through his large bedroom and stretching his limbs with a pained grimace. Dean does his best to confine him to the one room, not wanting him to run into Crowley outside, but sometimes he can’t stop Sam from exploring the corridor or the nearby rooms, so when that happens, Cas stands around trying to look inconspicuous while giving Dean signs whether or not it’s currently okay to let Sammy have his way.

Fortunately his lack of strength limits his rage of movement and Dean never offers to help him wander any further than he can go on his own.

Until one day Cas is asleep in another room and Sam is on the bed reading and Dean is in the shower showering. It feels great and since Sam’s doing so much better, Dean allows himself to just enjoy the moment without worrying about what the future might or might not hold for his brother or the fact that Sam doing better means that their time is running out. He comes back with damp hair, clean clothes and a freshly shaven face to an empty room, and his first thought is, _Shit, Sammy, don’t you dare!_

Cas’s room is the first one he checks. Opening the door with just a little too much force makes Cas stir, but Sam’s not there. Sam’s not in the neighbouring room either, the one where Jena sometimes is, when she’s present but not with them. Now it’s empty and Dean turns towards the other side of the corridor.

There are voices coming from the kitchen. Two voices, one quiet, one louder, both familiar, and Dean’s heart stop right there to spring back to life a second later, fuelled by rage.

“…not going to work that way,” Crowley is saying when Dean approaches the room, answered by Sam’s hoarse, “I know what to do, I just don’t-”

He’s interrupted, quite efficiently, by the door slamming against the wall with a loud bang that makes him jump and Crowley look up in alarm.

“In my defence,” the demon says, “he came to me. And I’m not anywhere near him. See? There’s an entire table between us. Well, if there’d be a table. The space where a table would fit. So calm the fuck down.”

“Get out of here before I fucking kill you!” Dean just growls. Sam looks at him through those fucking large deer-in-the-headlights eyes and what the fuck was he thinking? “What the hell, Sam? Would it have killed you to stay in the room?”

“Would it kill you to treat me like I’m not three?” Sam snaps back. “I’m not, and I’m not your prisoner.”

The words hit Dean like a slap to the face. “If you wanted to leave the room you could just have told me.”

“So you and Cas could have made sure that Crowley’s not around? I _wanted_ to talk to him, and you weren’t exactly supportive of that idea.”

“How did you even know he’s here? Did Cas tell you? No, he wouldn’t. It was Jena, right? Nice to know that she does _something_ with her spare time.”

“Dean.” Sam sounds at the same time annoyed and patient. “I can sense demons.”

“What, here as well?” Somehow, Dean had thought this place was some kind of power-free twilight zone for all powers but Jena’s. Especially since Cas was as set on keeping Crowley’s present a secret as Dean has been, and for obvious reasons Dean thought Cas would know more about how dimensions like this work.

“Yes. I knew there was a demon nearby, and I knew who it was.”

Now Sam’s not the only one being annoyed. “Why didn’t you fucking say something?”

“You seemed to feel better with me not knowing. Also, I was sick and not very keen on meeting him.”

“That why you insisted on wandering around? Were you deliberately trying to give me a heart attack?”

Sam scowls. “I knew where he was at any time. If he’d been standing outside the door, I wouldn’t have gone out.”

“Well, I can see you’re busy here. If it’s all the same for you, I’m gonna go now,” Crowley says smoothly, rising from his chair. Dean thinks about stopping him simply because the demons _wants_ to leave and Dean doesn’t want him to have anything he wants, but Dean also doesn’t want him around, so he lets him go. So does Sam. Either their conversation was over anyway or he thinks it wouldn’t go anywhere now big brother is here.

“What was it that you wanted to urgently to talk to him about that you couldn’t wait for me to return?” Dean asks tensely once they are alone.

“Judging by how you attempted to keep me in the dark here, I didn’t expect you to be all that excited about the idea. Or going to help with the conversation. I mean, you come in here and Crowley runs off. Really helpful.”

“What can there possibly be that’s so important and can only be discussed with him?”

“He’s kind of important to our plan, is he not? As am I. So who better to ask for details?”

“Jena.”

“Oh, please!”

“Seriously, Sam.” Dean runs a hand over his face, trying to calm his anger. “It’s fucking _Crowley_. How did you get this far without self-preservation instincts? Do you, by any chance, remember what he did to you?”

“I do, but what does it matter? What makes what Crowley did any different from what any given other person did to me? At least Crowley had a purpose I could get behind. He tried to get me out of the picture so Lucifer wouldn’t reach me and if he’d taken the time to explain things before doing them and I hadn’t been convinced that it wouldn’t work, I might even have supported his idea.”

“I really feel like punching you right now.”

“Why?” Sam sounds honestly confused, like he honestly doesn’t get it. After all these years, how can Dean possibly make him understand that he’s not worthless, that he has the same rights he defends for everyone else?

“You’re not a tool, Sam. You’re not a means to an end, and no one should treat you that way.”

Sam just sighs. He fucking sighs, like he’s tired of this discussion because he knows he won’t be able to convince Dean of his point of view no matter how long they argue.

So Dean has to calm down and try a different angle, one that will help him reach the idiot in front of him. In other words, he needs to mercilessly attack Sam’s weak spot. “What about me? Try for one moment to see this from my perspective. Imagine it was me trying to throw my life away for convenience even if there were about ten thousand other ways. Imagine me sneaking off to talk to Alastair because, hey, nothing personal, he was just out to break the first seal.”

Sam freezes up, as Dean expected him to. He doesn’t feel bad about it. “That something completely different.”

“Why? Because you don’t think you deserve it?”

“Because you had a future, Dean,” Sam snaps. “You still have. And I don’t. So what’s the point? Whether you’re aware or not, you’re only protecting me so I can live long enough to die for the cause.”

“You’re not going to die.”

“So what if I don’t? I could, and that would be okay if it served the purpose. I’m too much of a chess piece to be anything else. Have been all my life, only now I actually know it. No, don’t,” he says when Dean opens his mouth. “It’s okay. I’m not even bitter about it. I just need you to understand that you can’t keep treating me like a person. It’s not going anywhere.”

If he wants to really, really piss Dean off, he’s doing a great job. “You are a freaking person, Sam. You’re my favourite freaking person – don’t you think I can tell the difference between loving you and loving the Impala? Because that thing was my favourite anything, anytime, and I’d still have traded it for you in a heartbeat.”

“That’s not –”

“Do you think the Impala loved me back?”

“You sure acted like she did often enough.” There’s the faintest hint of a smile playing around Sam’s lips.

“Fuck you, Sam. Am I just deluding myself that you love me or do you actually do so?”

“Of course I love you, Dean. More than anything. But what’s the point of that if I let that get in the way of protecting you?”

“The point is that you can’t go on denying yourself any rights and needs you have as a human being.” Dean clamps his hands around the arm rests of the chair Sam is sitting in, all the better to yell into his face. “The point is that knowing what it’d do to you, I wouldn’t leave you just to _save the fucking world_!”

“Oh Dean.” Now Sam is showing a full smile, but it’s pained, his eyes damp. His long, scarred hands reach up to grasp his brother’s head, pulling it even closer, until their foreheads are almost touching. “You fucking hypocrite. Of course you would.”

Dean has nothing to say in return. He just pulls his brother closer, clutches him against his body so Sam’s head is resting against his shoulder, and tries to accept the way things have to be.

 

-

 

Since there’s no way to keep Sam, or anyone, from sacrificing his little brother for the cause and Dean actually gets why it has to be done, he quits the denial game and focuses his energy on finding a way to make sure Sam has the best chances he can have to survive the whole thing. Afterwards, he’ll have enough time to teach his brother something about self-worth and feeling like a fucking hero when they live out their days in the demon- and angel-free world Sam will have saved.

Step one is the actual confrontation with Lucifer. Satan will do anything in his power to kill Sam, so Sam needs to be damn awfully powerful for it. So, a lot of demon blood is needed, no matter if Dean likes it or not. And there’s no point in worrying about the withdrawal so much that Sam doesn’t have a chance to make it that far in the first place.

So while Dean still isn’t comfortable with Sam and Crowley being in the same room, the same doesn’t go for Crowley’s blood. It’s Jena who brings the first dose, telling them they have to start slowly and get Sam’s body used to the powerful stuff. It’s still more than he ever took at once in Dean’s presence.

Jena is also the one to prepare Sam on how to fight her brother. Sam knows how to face angels, has done so often enough, and Cas has taught him a lot about their weaknesses and strengths in the decades they shared, but Jena knows Lucifer better than Cas ever could. Lucifer was the one who taught her all her tricks and now she’s teaching Sam the tricks to defeat him.

The two of them spend a lot of time together, discussing things, Sam listening with that damn intent expression on his face that must have made him every teacher’s favourite. (Dean knows for a fact that in the first years, until he was fourteen or fifteen, Sam hadn’t even _tried_ to get good grades, since the way he grew up taught him that school was something he had to endure because everyone did while it didn’t actually have any meaning for his future life and the work of his family. In those years Sam got good grades simply because he loved to learn new things.) Dean and Castiel mostly watch from the sidelines, rarely getting involved while Jena is present.

She still disappears a lot. Sam still needs a lot of rest. Dean has no way of telling how long they will remain here, how much longer he has before he might lose his brother for good. He asked Jena about it once but her reply was a somewhat vague “We’ll leave when we can.”

Sometimes Dean catches himself hoping Sam’s recovery would go slower.

But with Crowley’s blood, it goes faster than it naturally should. Not much so, because Sam’s body has been through too much to really appreciate the boost, but then, by all rights Sam should be dead by now, or at the very least bound to the bed for another couple of weeks.

The dose of demon blood gets bigger every day. At first Sam was reluctant about it, though Dean didn’t miss the relieved slump of his shoulders when, for the first time in forever, he could drink enough to sate the craving instead of sufficing with a sip or two that probably made the craving worse rather than stilling it.

Now it is normal to see Sam drink three or four glasses worth of blood every day, which is possible only because Crowley’s stolen body recovers from the loss quicker than a human would. He complains about it, the one time Dean accompanies Jena when she goes to refill, but gives his blood willingly. Either he really wants Lucifer gone, or he’s scared of them.

Dean secretly likes the second possibility better.

But the blood does things to Sam beyond helping him heal. It’s subtle at first, but eventually, Dean can no longer ignore the way his brother gets quieter, more intensely focused on something that none of the people around him can see. There’s a gleam to his eyes that looks almost fanatical, and he paces a lot, restless but with nowhere to go. Sleep escapes him no matter how tired he gets, and when he does sleep after all, the nightmares are always screaming.

It’s also kind of hard to ignore the way his formerly hazel eyes have turned into a deep black that never disappears anymore. It’s not all the white disappearing as it does with demons, but the black iris is enough to make Dean reluctant to look into his eyes anymore. But that’s easy, anyway, since Sam doesn’t look into his eyes either.

The nightmares steadily get worse Maybe the blood reaches out to Lucifer, maybe it just does shit to Sam’s mind, but he’s jerking and crying and screaming in his sleep all the time, so Dean can’t really blame him for trying to avoid it. Once, Dean tries to wake him from a nightmare and is blown back, off the bed and halfway through the room by something he can’t see, while Sam arches off the bed in a seizure. Another time Sam wakes up with a start the second the water bottle beside his bed explodes.

Jena is worried about that – really worried, in the this-should-not-happen kind of way that tells Dean things aren’t going as they are supposed to and she’s out of her depth here. This place doesn’t allow for any supernatural powers but her own, she explains at some point. Crowley’s demonic abilities are suppressed, as are Sam’s powers. They are there but he can’t reach them, and that is one of the reasons why he is so restless: the power in him is growing while bottled up with no release. Perhaps it breaking out of him like this was inevitable, she admits – but she did not think it would happen, because Sam’s powers, even with the blood of a high-class demon, shouldn’t be this strong.

If Sam worries about it or even knows that there’s something wrong, Dean can’t tell. Well, it is pretty obvious that something is wrong, everything is wrong, but no one pointed out to Sam yet that he shouldn’t actually be able to use his powers like that, or at all.

“It’s good, though, right?” Dean asks one day, when he’s alone with Jena while Cas is with Sam. “Him being this strong. That means better chances at beating Lucifer.”

“It means mostly that we should really, really hope our plan works.” As usual when Dean is grasping for straws, Jena slaps his hand away. “Sam is Lucifer’s vessel, his _true_ vessel. He was _created_ for no other purpose and all that power was never meant for him.”

Dean never liked having that spelled out but it’s not exactly new information “What exactly does that mean for us now?”

“It means we can’t wait too long. We can’t go too early because Sam won’t be ready, and we can’t wait too long because all that power inside him is meant for Lucifer to handle and only he can. Sam has all these powers that are there even without the demon blood to help him access them, but he can’t use them the way they are meant to be used. It’s getting stronger every day and eventually it’ll tear him apart from the inside or worse.”

“Or _worse_?”

“He could actually start using them.”

“You just said he couldn’t.”

“No, _Sam_ couldn’t. The moment he does, he’ll turn into something else, much like all the other special children of the demon Azazel. The moment they accepted their powers and used them for their own gain, there was no way back. The fact that Sam _never_ accepted those powers is probably the only reason he didn’t go down the same path.”

“Sam’s been using his powers quite a lot, in case you didn’t notice.”

“Yeah, but he always uses the demon blood as a crutch. It enables but also limits his abilities and denies him direct access. Pretty clever, actually.” Jena purses her lips. “Well, apart from the thing where it’s addictive and killing him.”

None of this helps Dean over his bad mood. In fact, he wants to call a stop to all of this more than ever before, but just like before, he can’t do it. He has no right, wouldn’t have it even if it was his call to make.

He wonders, though, if Sam would turn his back to their plan if Dean honestly begged him to.

“So are you still convinced you can get him through the withdrawal?” he asks bitterly, remembering the warning from long, long ago that if Sam continued as he was doing, with the powers and the blood, that there would be no turning back for him. He’d lose all humanity, Dean had been told (by none other than Castiel, who is now for all intents and purposes in full support of this plan).

Is that what’s waiting for Sam now? Is he turning into something else, something not-Sam that might survive the battle and the withdrawal but won’t be Dean’s brother anymore?

But didn’t Dean have doubts like this before? And if he remembered correctly, that didn’t work out so well for either of them.

Still, it’s hard to push them away, now, when Sam acts so erratic and pulls the bedroom apart in his sleep.

“Don’t worry about the withdrawal,” Jena tells him as she turns to leave, but whether she means that the prospect is no worse than before or that the withdrawal is the least of their worries, she doesn’t say.

 

-

 

Almost a day passes before Dean gets to talk to Sam again, and when he does, he isn’t even sure if his brother is listening. They are alone for the first time in what feels like ages, Jena having withdrawn to recharge her powers after a day of training and Castiel being nowhere in sight, and Dean is tired and stressed and just wants Sammy to look at him and tell him it’s all going to be okay.

That won’t do. He’s the big brother in this set up and Sam the one who needs support.

“Sam.” He’s been trying to get a proper reaction out of his brother for a while now, but Sam just sits there on the edge of the bed, staring blindly ahead, his hair unruly and moving slightly with the back and forth rocking of Sam’s shoulders. He makes a movement that might be a nod, might be an acknowledgement of having been addressed, but Dean can’t be sure of even that. “Sam,” he repeats, his voice stronger. He grabs his brother’s bony shoulder and feels the heat through his shirt. “Are you in there, little brother?”

Finally, Sam’s bloodshot eyes focus on him, if only for a second. He looks sick. He’s pale and feverish and Dean feels him tremble. It must be the exhaustion, or the power tearing him apart, or both.

They can’t stall this much longer, Jena was right.

“We’re leaving tomorrow.”

Sam’s words are rough, hoarse and completely unexpected. Dean almost reels back as if hit by a physical blow. Instead he tightens his grip on Sam’s shoulder, takes hold of the other one and crouches before him. “Look at me, Sammy,” he demands, staying that way until Sam does. “Hey,” he says when he finally has his brother’s attention. “You look like crap.”

Sam smiles at him. It’s thin and brittle, but he tries. “I’m scared, Dean.” And no, that’s not okay, that’s so very far from okay. For a second Dean resents his brother for being unable to put on a brave face and making him feel like this, but that’s just his own panic showing its ugly head. Sam is scared and there’s nothing Dean can do to help him.

“It’s gonna be okay, Sam,” Dean whispers, makes it a promise because there is no other acceptable option. “You’re gonna kick his ass and then it’ll all be over. Jena’ll help you get over the blood and then we’ll just sit around and watch the world recover. It’s just two more days and everything will be fine.”

In response, Sam lets out at chocked sob and starts clinging to his brother as if Dean’s presence alone can save him from damnation.

 

-

 

Long ago, years and centuries in the past, Dean made a deal for his brother’s life that left him with one year to live. They had worked out a plan to save him but deep inside Dean knew that his time had come. The last night before the year ran out he couldn’t sleep. Even knowing that he would need his senses sharp the next day if there was to be any hope at all, he only tossed on the sheets for an hour or so before giving up and finding something to do. There was no point in wasting time like that; sleep wouldn’t come, and all he could do was lie awake and think about how he was wasting the last night in all of eternity in which he would know something like peace.

This night it’s no different. The only exception is that Dean isn’t even sure it is night, or if the word has any meaning in this place. And, of course, there’s the fact that tomorrow is going to be the end, but not for either of them. Just for the apocalypse. Just for Lucifer.

He just wants it to be over.

And of course this night is nothing, _nothing_ at all like his own last one, because now he’s the one who might get left behind, the one desperately trying to save something and fearing it’s already lost. For the first time, Dean gets a taste of what Sam was going through when his deal came due. (When Sam died for the first time, it happened suddenly, without warning. In many ways, it was kinder.)

When it was Dean’s turn, Sam didn’t even attempt to sleep, though he made Dean try. This, at least, is the same. Sam is beat, looking ready to drop, his eyes red and his hands trembling with exhaustion, and Dean tries to make him lie down and close his eyes, but it’s hopeless. Sam is too agitated and nervous, too much brimming with power he can’t let out and can’t contain and if he were to sleep, in all honesty, Dean doesn’t think his dreams would be any kinder than what he himself had to endure in his final days, when Hell was already bleeding through.

So Sam never even lies down and Dean lets him pace, lets him scribble in the notebook he somehow managed to save through all that happened and tries to distract him with conversation, which doesn’t work because he might just as well be talking to a frantic, utterly heartbreaking wall. At least, he thinks, this won’t be Sam’s last chance at peaceful sleep. He’s not going to Hell – at least not forever. Even if it fails and Lucifer kills him, Sam will give in eventually and then he won’t suffer anymore.

Perhaps Lucifer will even be kind enough to make him forget.

It’s the only consolation he can hold on to as he finally gives up talking and lets the rest of the night pass in tense silence.

 

-

 

The next day comes far too quickly. Dean thought he would get time to prepare, that they would all gather in the kitchen to talk through their plan, have a last snack, all go to the bathroom one last time, the usual leaving procedure. Instead he blinks awake from the minutes of sleep that fell over him while he was sitting on a chair to bright light – much brighter than the dimmed lights he hoped would lure Sam to sleep some. Jena comes into the room, followed by Cas and carrying a bottle filled with dark red blood. Sam takes it with shaking hands, has troubled unscrewing the lid. He doesn’t hold back, doesn’t set it down until it’s empty. No more feeding him with drops on someone else’s palm. These days Sam can drink as much as he can take.

Dean knows, without anyone telling him, that this is the last dose he’ll ever get.

Crowley lingers in the doorway, for the first time since Dean caught him and Sam in the kitchen coming within sight of Dean’s brother. Sam ignores him so completely it seems deliberate. He never looks at the demon and maybe that’s the reason: with his powers flaring the way they do, just looking at a demon might be painful. Dean imagines him being able to see the ugly truth under the human façade, the way Dean was able to see demons within their possessed hosts on his last day before Hell.

“You don’t give much warning, do you?” he hisses at Jena, who looks back entirely unaffected.

“You knew we were going to leave today.”

“Just like that? Won’t you at least tell us the details of your brilliant plan before we meet Lucifer, or are we going to run around for a few more weeks before we actually get around to ending this?”

“It will end today,” she confirms his original assumption, much to his relief. “Either way.”

“So. We go out and run right into Lucifer’s arms? Give me something to work with here! What do I have to expect when we leave?”

“I won’t bother with the protections that usually shield us from detection. With Sam powerful like this, he will shine like a beacon. That is all. Lucifer will come to us quickly.”

“Oh, so we just get out and wait for him? And what if someone else is faster? Or he sends some lackey to come instead?”

“Won’t happen,” Jena assures him with a casual wave of her hand. “Sam is so powerful now that no being, demon, angel, or otherwise, is going to risk coming near him, and even if they did, he could toast them without effort. And Lucy won’t let anyone have this, even if he found someone stupid enough to try.”

“You really think he won’t recognize the trap?”

“Oh, he’ll know it’s a trap. He’ll come anyway, because he thinks Sam’s still no danger to him.” She grins briefly. “Hubris: always something to count on.”

“Awesome,” Dean mutters, biting his lip. “What do we do? Take the rings and wait for our chance?” He’d hoped Jena had gotten the information how to use them from Crowley yet, because he would rather not have to depend on the demon in such a crucial moment. But no – of course Crowley wouldn’t have revealed it yet. Not before he’s sure he can get away in time.

“No, we – most of all _you_ – are going to see that we get out of there,” Jena corrects him. “You and Castiel are just walking targets. Lucifer is going to go after you first, to bring Sam off balance, so you will not be anywhere near them.”

“The hell I won’t! I won’t let Sam fight him on his own.”

“Dean, she’s right.”

The hoarse voice comes as a surprise. Quiet and unfocused as Sam is, it was easy to assume he wasn’t really aware of anything spoken around him, but apparently he heard every word. “You’d only die. I can’t protect you. Please, just go.”

“That’s not an option. Who’s gonna watch over you, huh?”

“Sam will watch over himself,” Castiel joins the conversation. It’s the first time Dean heard him speak in days. “But he can only do that if he doesn’t have to watch over us as well.”

“What about Jena?” Dean asks, desperate not to let his little brother face the Devil without him.

“I’m gonna run right with you and keep your asses from randomly getting fried,” Jena informs him.

“What?” No, that doesn’t make sense. Dean really should have addressed this all sooner instead on relying on getting enough notice of their leaving to have a discussion, because obviously, nobody really thought this through. “I thought you’d fight with Sam. You’re an archangel! The two of you would have much better chances than just Sam on his own.”

“True, but it would also make sure that Lucy called for his own support team, and believe me, they outnumber us. When it’s just him and Sam he will make sure it stays just him and Sam. Pride and all that. Sam is his, he won’t let anyone else take this victory from him. Other players would get in the way and might keep the cage from being opened.”

“Who will even open the cage in your plan? We’re all going to be gone!”

“Sam will do it.”

“Oh, right, he’ll just get the upper hand and then take out the rings and sing the incantation or whatever while sitting on Satan.”

“Give him some credit,” Castiel comments and turns away to take the now empty bottle out of Sam’s hands. Dean glares at him, feeling betrayed. Cas should be with him on this. He shouldn’t want to leave Sam alone any more than Dean does.

Then he catches sight of Cas’ face, just for a heartbeat, and understands that Cas does share his feeling, but has resigned himself to his own helplessness.

And Dean still hates him just as he hates himself as he accepts it as well; as he plays over the possible scenarios in his mind and finds none that has him present and ends well. But the thought of knowing Sam is fighting the hardest and most important battle of his life and not being there to support him, not knowing how he is doing – that is almost worse.

“What about using the rings?” he hears his own voice ask, coming from far away. “When is he going to learn that?”

“As soon as we’re out of here and I can get my ass to safety the moment you have no further use for me,” Crowley answers in Jena’s stead, and of course that makes sense. He has little reason to trust any of them.

Dean doesn’t like any of this, not at all. Every fibre of his being screams at him to put a stop to the plan, but he couldn’t do that even if he tried. The decision was made long ago. Maybe Sam’s journey was always meant to end with him facing Lucifer, on his own.

Hell, no. Sam’s journey isn’t meant to end with _anything_ that included the words ‘on his own’. Dean is meant to be with him, no matter what fate has to say about it. And that is exactly the reason why he can’t move now, can’t bring himself to speak any more, because everything is wrong and he has no choice, no choice but to let it get worse.

So here they are all ready to leave. Jena and Cas carried in the backpacks they had with them when coming here and now Cas wordlessly hands Dean his coat. It’s going to be cold again. They are leaving here to be cold and hungry and Sam-less.

How long is this going to take? How long before they can return and pick Sam up, prepare to get him off the blood or – Dean swallows dryly as he forces himself to face the possibility – bury him?

He takes the coat with numb hands, slips into it. Crowley isn’t wearing anything but his suit and Jena is in her usual sleeveless dress, but Cas is wrapped up. He and Dean, they are dressing for survival. Sam isn’t.

His coat is still hanging over the back of a chair, as it has been every since they came here. Dean grabs it, hands it to his brother without a word. Sam stares. He doesn’t take it.

“I won’t need that,” he whispers.

“You wear it. It’s cold outside.”

“I won’t feel it. I don’t feel much of anything right now. The power… It’s overlaying everything else.”

“You wear it. If you want me to leave, you’re going to dress properly so I’ll know you’ll be warm enough until we come back and get you.”

It’s his big brother voice, and Sam lets out a sound that sounds a lot like a sob when he takes the coat with trembling hands and slips into it with jerky movements. His arms wrap around himself. He’s afraid, Dean realizes. He’s going to save the world or damn it and Dean gave him a coat because that is all he can do.

He would love to give him the amulet, Sam’s most important present to Dean, the one possession he treasured above anything else, perhaps even his car, but his hand goes to his chest and his finger only close around empty air.

“Are we ready, then?” There is only impatience in Jena’s voice. (She doesn’t care for the brother she might be about to lose.) “Let’s go.”

 

-

 

As predicted, it’s cold when they emerge, although there is no snow. Once again Dean has no idea where they are. Stone greets them all around; they are in a small canyon, or earth gab, that would have no room for the house they just left. The light is already getting dimmer; not a good time of day to start running.

An icy wind hits them the moment they step out of the protection of the rocks, making Sam’s coat and Jena’s hair fly. Above them, the clouds and the dust race across the sky. Dean’s hand goes to his brother’s shoulder; he doesn’t know if he’ll be able to let go.

A barren landscape lies before them. Earthy hills rise and fall until the gloom of the oncoming night swallows them, the ground slowly dropping to one side until it ends in a cliff. Dean can make out the glitter of the ocean in the distance, quickly getting lost in the haze. There are rocks strewn all over the hills, pillars of molten stone rising toward the sky. If there ever was a place fitting for a last stand, this is it.

“Okay, here’s the deal,” Jena says. “Crowley’s gonna give Sam the magic words now, and we’re gonna wait long enough to make sure he does so before we’re out of here. Any questions? No? Awesome. Say your goodbyes, you have five seconds.”

Dean wants to pull his brother close, pull him into a hug and hold on tight. But he is only able to place a hand on his shoulder and with effort he manages to meet Sam’s eyes. “Kick him in the ass,” he hears himself say, Ellen Harvelle’s long lost voice echoing in his mind.

Sam smiles at him; he’s stronger than Dean, after all. Afterwards, he turns to Cas and tells him to look after Dean for him, and Dean wants to scream at him because they are only going to be apart for a few hours and there’s no need to make this overly dramatic. No need to make plans for a future in which Sam won’t be present.

Jena, predictably, doesn’t say anything. She only places two rings in Sam’s hand and then Crowley fishes in his pockets for the other two. Without doubt Jena was aware that he had them with him all the time, but without knowing how to use them they are not worth much.

That even Jena doesn’t know what to do with them would be interesting if Dean actually had it in him to care.

The rings, once close to each other, snap together as if attracted by magnets, forming a structure with three rings placed around one in the centre. Sam holds them loosely, inspecting them through bloodshot eyes.

He looks so tired.

“We’re going to be over there,” Crowley declares. “You guys can watch but I don’t want you in hearing distance when I tell him what to do. And when I’m done, you’d better make sure to get out of here. I certainly will.”

“I bet,” Jena says. “Well, then, don’t waste time. I would think you have about five minutes before Lucifer homes in on us.”

“Don’t worry, I won’t be here a second longer than I have to.” Crowley takes Sam by the arm and Dean wants to stab him. Sam follows the demon willingly and without another look at Dean; he just walks away and Dean wants to stop him. But he doesn’t move. It is as if he were frozen.

“Brace yourselves.” Jena nearly sing-songs, sounding completely unconcerned, just eager to get things moving. “As soon as Crowley is done, we’re gone.”

“Lucifer will pick up on your flight,” Castiel mutters, somewhere far away.

“Lucifer won’t give a damn about us.”

Dean hears them but doesn’t listen. His eyes are fixed on Sam and Crowley, walking down the slope until they reach even ground. The wind is even stronger there, though not quite yet a storm. It billows Sam’s coat and hair as Crowley pulls him close and down, speaking directly into his ear. Clever. If Jena could see his lips move, she’d read the words, but they are obscured by Sam’s head now.

Then the demon pulls back, says something else and Sam nods, stands straight and tense and ready as Crowley pulls a knife from underneath his coat and plunges it into Sam’s chest.

Dean’s scream is ripped from his throat like an echo from the past.

Strong hands grab him from behind, hold him back as he watches Sam crumble to the ground, making no move at all the stop his fall. Crowley stands there for a second longer, looking down at him, then up and at Dean and Cas and Jena and he fucking _nods_ , nods as if to assure them of a job well done and then he’s gone, and a heartbeat later so is everything else.

The last thing Dean sees is the wind playing with Sam’s coat.

 


	19. Chapter 19

He tears himself out of the hands holding him as soon as the dizziness of instant travel has passed, and that is possible only because the hands let him go willingly. Jena doesn’t even blink as his hands close around the collar of her flimsy dress and he pushes her backwards, shaking her. “What have you done?” he hears himself scream. “You bastard! Tell me you didn’t want this! Tell me this was _not your plan_!”

Jena’s face is dark as she brushes his hands off with a casual gesture, but it’s Cas who speaks. “Of course it was.”

Dean whirls around, ready to punch where it will actually hurt, but then he sees his friend’s face, pale and shocked with dawning understanding and growing anger. “It makes sense now. No matter how powerful, Sam would not survive a minute in a physical fight.” Cas’ eyes meet Jena’s, hard and unforgiving. “Why didn’t you tell us? Why didn’t _Sam_ tell us?”

Sam knew. Of course he knew, and he didn’t tell Dean, he knew he was going to die for weeks and he didn’t give a warning or say goodbye, had just let himself get killed while Dean was watching, had just left.

“Why?” Jena raises her eyebrows, letting him know it’s a stupid question. “ _This_ is why!” She nods at Dean who still wants to hurt her but can’t even move, paralyzed with rage and desperation. “Dean here would have made a drama out of it, and we didn’t have time for that. It was Sam who asked me not to tell you, by the way. He probably didn’t want to make it harder than it had to be.”

There is so much Dean could say to that. He doesn’t. Sam did this to him. Sam did this to himself. He can’t grasp it yet. What he knows is that Jena lied to him, to them.

“How long have you been planning this?” he asks through a closing throat. His voice sounds strangled. He’s being strangled here. “Did you ever even look for a way that had Sam survive this?”

“It was clear from the beginning that Sam’s survival was very, very unlikely. So, no. It just wasn’t in, and yeah, I’m sorry and all, but you need to understand that we’re talking about something that has been planned for millennia, and in the grand scheme of things, your brother is simply not meant to live. He never was.”

Because he is just a body for Lucifer to run around in. Just like Dean is for Micheal. And yet here they are. “Things didn’t turn out the way they were meat to.”

“Quite right. And yet the fact remains that there is no place in this world for Samuel Winchester.”

That’s not acceptable. It never was, never will be. Dean takes a step back and nearly stumbles when the magnitude of what happened, what _is_ happening is crashing down on him. Sam is with Lucifer now, he willingly handed himself over.

He’s with Lucifer _right now_.

“Did he give in yet?” He doesn’t even want to know, doesn’t want to imagine Satan wearing his little brother’s face because he’s seen that before and it pushed him right over the edge.

“No. It’s too soon.”

“Too soon?” The meaning of those words doesn’t register immediately. “ _Too soon_? You mean, he…” Dean can’t even say it. No.

No.

“That’s the plan,” Castiel says, his voice dull. “Don’t you see? Sam only has a chance to get a hold on Lucifer if he can take him by surprise. Lucifer can’t know what we’re planning. That’s why _Crowley_ killed him. It had to look sudden, unintentional. If Sam gives in right away, it’s suspicious. He has fought far too long for that. No, he’ll hold on as long as he h-has to.” His voice falters. Dean needs to sit down. His knees feel like wax.

“Take me back there.”

“No.”

“ _Take me back to him!_ ” It’s almost a surprise that somehow, somewhere he found the strength to yell.

“There’s nothing you can do.”

“I can be there for him. He can’t do this alone.” Sam being tortured. Sam waking up with the Devil inside him, all alone. No.

“And how well do you think this will go when Sam has to witness Lucifer tearing you apart with his own hands?” Jena’s voice is surprisingly soft, almost gentle. Dean doesn’t want gentle, he wants to be taken back there. He needs to be with Sam because if there is one chance to get through this, one single chance to beat the angels at their own game, they have to do it together.

“What can we do _here_?” he whispers, or maybe he just thinks it. “We abandoned him.”

“No, we didn’t. I did what Sam asked me to: make sure you’re alright. You’ll be alright even if Sam loses – both of you will be. I’m sure he will make that the condition of his surrender.”

“Whatever that will be worth once Lucifer realizes Sam is trying to overcome him and…” Cas trails off in a way that somehow makes everything worse.

“And what?” Dean asks. “Sam’s gonna overcome him, right? And then he’ll open the damn cage and throw Lucifer back in and everything’s good.”

“Dean.” Castiel’s voice sounds pained. “Think.”

Dean just stares at him. He’s thinking, but it’s not going anywhere. There is an inevitable conclusion that his will is running against trying to move it out of the way. He stands still, staring at Cas who looks like he is going to cry.

“Okay, time to sit down, everyone.” Jena takes hold of Dean’s arm and starts pulling him along. He lets it happen without resistance. Eventually, his shins hit something hard and he’s turned around and gently prompted to sit. There’s no reason not to. He sits. It’s a chair. He’s in a kitchen.

“What is the plan?” he whispers without looking at any of them. “Tell me.”

Cas actually laughs; it sounds quiet and bitter. “Sam will let Lucifer in, and then, when he can, he will gain control and he’ll open the cage and he’ll-”

“Don’t,” Dean whispers.

“-get Lucifer locked up by jumping in with him.”

“God.” Dean can’t see anything. His eyes must be closed. He feels two tears run down his cheeks, one from each eye, and fall onto his jeans. More follow.

“It was Sam’s plan,” Jena says and it hurts worse.

 

-

 

“If it’s going to be any consolation,” Jena eventually says, after the silence went on for a long time and Dean just struggled to breathe, to go on, “it’s probably not going to work. Lucifer is too strong. Sam won’t win, which for him is the best thing that can possibly happen. Of course we’re all fucked then, but to Sam it’s the best possible outcome.”

Dean hopes he will lose. Right there, he doesn’t give a fuck about the world, about anything other than Sam not going to Hell, with Lucifer and his rage, for all eternity.

He looks at Cas, sitting on the floor. Leaning against a wall. There are walls. Three and a half walls. This isn’t one of Jena’s special places. This is a ruin somewhere on the planet. “Tell me you didn’t know.”

“I didn’t know.”

It’s enough. Cas didn’t know. Dean believes him because his reaction left no doubt, and because it would be too much if he didn’t. Cas wouldn’t have let Sam do that to himself, no matter how much Sam wanted to do it. Would he?

Dean doesn’t ask that.

“Why the demon blood?” He turns to Jena again. She’s leaning against a table: plastic and metal. There’s grass growing on the kitchen floor. “Why put him through that? You saw what it did to him. Just to fool us?”

“The blood was necessary.” Behind Jena, half the wall is missing, allowing view on the meadow beyond. No snow. “Lucifer needs it to keep his vessels from falling apart too quickly. He’s basically bathing in the stuff. With his true vessel, he won’t need it. This was for Sam, to support him, something familiar to draw strength from. Lucifer won’t purge it from his system, not when it does more good than harm for him.”

After that, Dean is silent, trying to take in the information. Make sense of it, somehow. His brother is going to die. No, his brother is dead already, and he’s going to Hell, to a place in Hell where Dean can never, ever reach him.

Sam is lost. It doesn’t make sense. He thinks the words and they mean nothing to him (except an ever growing cold cancer of despair in his stomach that will never go away and it might kill him but Dean will still not get his brother back if it does).

Sam has to lose. He has to, because if he does, Dean might see him again, some day. One day. Maybe when the world is what Lucifer wants, he will let Sam go. Probably, he won’t. But he’ll keep his soul safe in Hell, keep it far from suffering and from everyone else and Dean will become the strongest demon there ever was if he has to in order to fight his way to his brother.

Why did they ever try to save this world in the first place? Why all the effort, the suffering? Why bother?

Why didn’t Sammy give in when Dean did? He could have spared himself, spared all of them so much.

A wave of anger at his brother washes over him, fuelled by his own pain and desperation, because being angry is so much easier than facing the pain. It’s then that Dean realizes that he’s already grieving.

 

-

 

“Where are we?”

It’s Castiel who asks. Dean doesn’t care where they are. There has been silence for a long time; he doesn’t quite know how long, nor does he care. He doesn’t care about anything anymore. There’s nothing left for him to do.

“Europe,” Jena replies. “Denmark. It doesn’t really matter, does it? We’re pretty far from everything. There are barely any intelligent beings left on Jutland, and those that are aren’t anywhere near us.”

Dean doesn’t care if there is anyone else left on the planet.

Silence falls again. In the silence, Jena is wandering through the kitchen, her bare toes drawing symbols into the dry dirt on the floor, before finally she wanders out through the hole in the wall. It takes a while, but eventually Cas gets up and follows her, walking like a zombie. He knows everything is lost, too, and he’s been fighting so much longer and harder than Dean.

Dean stays there, sitting on his chair, for a long time. When he does move, when he gets up and walks out and takes in his surroundings, it happens automatically, as if someone else were controlling his body.

“Michael,” he says, his voice toneless, but it all is so clear right now.

Jena looks up from where she is sitting in the grass. “No.”

“He will need a vessel.”

“And he will come to you.” Jena nods. “And you will tell him no.” Her fingers are playing with the grass and behind her are some bushes in bloom, the sweet scent of their pink blossoms so intense that Dean can smell them from where he is standing. He can’t see Cas, but he hears his voice, from around the corner of the house, after he asked, “Why bother?”

“Because Sam doesn’t want you to be Michael’s vessel,” Cas says. “Because he did so much to get you back and protect you and you owe it to him not to give up now.”

“Sam wants me to suffer?” Dean asks bitterly.

“If that what it comes down to, yes. It’s the least you can do for him.”

Cas is sitting with his back against the wall of the house; Dean can make out his sprawled legs through the tears in his eyes. “What’s the point?” he wants to know. “It’s over. We just handed the world over to Satan, why would Sam want me to live in it?”

“We don’t know that,” Jena reminds him; Dean would like nothing more than forget she exists. “Sam might win after all.”

“You don’t even believe that,” Dean accuses her, and Castiel as well.

Neither of them says anything in return.

 

-

 

Night fall slowly. The colour of the clouds has turned to a deep red, the dust drifting before it in black strands when suddenly Jena jerks upright from where she was lying in the grass with a gasp and a hand flying to her head.

Dean doesn’t have to ask. He’s seen angels taking their vessels before and the blinding white light that goes along with it. He has never before seen a light like the one that flashes across the sky only seconds after Jena’s reaction. It makes the clouds shine for a fraction of a second, like lightning in a thunderstorm and no one has to explain what it means.

As he falls to his knees, Dean finds that he has some strength left to care, after all.

 

-

 

It’s a lot warmer in Denmark than it was in the states. It’s not hot, not even mild, but so much better than being constantly subjected to freezing winds. If there were crickets chirping in the grass, Dean would be able to imagine that this was a summer night and he was lying on the porch of their house of the month while dad was hunting and Sammy sleeping in their room. But there’s only silence around him, all-consuming silence in which he can hear his own heartbeat. He closes his eyes and tries to imagine it anyway, longs for sleep.

A hand, hard and merciless, closes around his shoulder, startling him just when he is about to drift off. Dean’s eyes fly open; he makes out the familiar outline of Cas before the dark sky.

“You will not invite Michael to possess your body!” the fallen angel snarls. “You will not betray Sam that way!”

“Sam betrayed me, too!” Dean snaps back. “He just left! I couldn’t even say goodbye.”

“And he’s been saying goodbye to you for months. Let that be enough. Honour the fact that having gotten you back as your own person is the one thing Sam had to be happy about.”

He’s right, but it’s hard to accept. So fucking hard. Dean just wants it to be over, but that’s not all. He’s not only selfish.”

“Is Jena here?”

“Yes,” a female voice sounds somewhere in the dark.

“You’d know if Lucifer were back in his cage, right?”

“Yes.”

“And is he?”

A sigh. “No.”

“So Sam failed.” Dean shakes Cas’ hand off with an angry gesture. “And now Lucifer is running around in his body, finishing off what’s left of mankind. It’s exactly what Sam _never_ wanted. What he was so afraid of. I don’t give a fuck about the world, but I can’t let that go on. I have to save him.”

“By letting in Michael?” Cas growls.

“How else? Michael is so eager for their fucking last stand. And if he had his true vessel, he might be stronger than his brother. He’s had time to get used to me, after all. He’d win.”

“And there is no way that Sam would,” Jena points out. “It might just take him some time to find the strength he needs to overthrow Lucifer. He’ll need a moment of carelessness. Right now, there is still hope. Throwing Michael at him is gonna be the worst thing that could happen. Did you know that all Lucifer ever wanted was to impress his big brother, back before he fell? Do you think Sam has any chance at all to fight him down once Lucifer sees Michael and wants to appear before him in all his pride and glory?”

The words echo inside Dean, knocking on the doors of his mind, and he finds himself staring at Cas while they keep talking to him, not listening. Why would he listen? The important thing has been said and they didn’t even notice.

It’s the only thing that makes sense and he doesn’t know, now the thought is in his mind, how it took so long for it to get there.

“Gabriel,” Dean says, using the angel’s real name without even realising it. “You need to take me back right now.”

“Excuse me, did this conversation, or any we had before, somehow pass without you hearing a single word we said?” There’s movement in the dark and then Jena’s slim outline appears beside Cas, her long hair hanging down like that of a Japanese ghost.

“I listened to the part that was interesting.” Dean gets to his feet and brushes Cas’ hand away when he reaches for him. “You’re right, don’t you see? Sam doesn’t have a chance if Michael is around, because Michael and Lucifer are brothers and love each other despite everything.” He tries to wait in silence for the others to understand, but they are taking too long for his patience and he continues after less than five seconds. “So are Sam and I. Both Michael and Lucifer gave us speeches about how we were modelled after them, and as much as I resent that, there are parallels that can’t be denied. Only difference is that the two of them want to kill each other and Sam and I do not. We just want to protect one another.”

“Could it be that you’re forgetting the other tiny difference where Michael and Lucifer are archangels and you and Sam are not?” There’s no doubt that Jena thinks Dean is an idiot and on any other day he would generally agree. But despite having spent so much time at their side and even more watching them, she doesn’t even know him and Sam. She doesn’t know the lengths they’d go to for each other. And she definitely has no idea what she’s talking about if she thinks that the love between them is somehow less powerful just because they are no feathered dicks with the means to crush the planet.

“Michael isn’t going to give up just because Dean won’t let him in,” Castiel unexpectedly says. “He isn’t as dependant on one single perfect vessel as Lucifer is, and while Dean is still his first choice, he will make do with the vessel he has should Dean turn him down. He will not ask for long.”

“Are you encouraging him to say yes now?” Jena asks, incredulous frown clearly audible in her voice.

“Not at all. On the contrary – Lucifer will be strengthened by Michael’s presence, and it will be even worse if Sam sees that Michael is back in Dean’s body and his fight has been in vain. But Michael is going to ask Dean once, and then he will go in the body of Adam Milligan. And Sam will still be lost. So if we want to help him, we will have to do it before Michael and Lucifer meet on the battlefield.”

The help is unexpected, but not unwelcome. “Take me to him,” Dean pleads. “What do you have to lose? You don’t give a fuck about me and you don’t give a fuck about what Sam wants, so don’t pull that card! You want Lucifer to go back in his cage, right? This is your best chance to get that, and if I get killed in the process, everything was lost anyway.”

Jena sighs, long-suffering and irritated and in a way that tells Dean he’s won. He’s going to see what he fears more than anything, so much that it once pushed him to lose all hope and into Michael’s arms: Satan in his brother’s skin.

“Very well,” the archangel finally gives in. “You’re probably right. And you’re probably going to die. You know, I kind of liked the idea of keeping the two of you around after everything else got destroyed. People are more entertaining than plants and once Lucy is done here, the two of you would have been the only people left alive. If he was feeling gracious, of course, and didn’t think he’d need to punish Sammy for trying to get one over him.”

“Yeah, I know you’re a heartless bitch who doesn’t give a shit about anything but herself,” Dean told her. “You don’t actually need to confirm it at every opportunity.”

“One has a reputation to uphold.” He can see Jena’s shrug as a vague movement in the darkness as Dean pushes himself to his feet and reaches for her arm. Her bare skin is soft beneath his rough palm, a little cold from being exposed to the night air like this. Perfectly human but for what’s inside.

“Do you know where he is?”

“Where we left him, as far as I can tell: in Detroit.”

Detroit. Of course. This, at least, remained the same. Dean wonders if it’s a coincidence, fate, or if Jena knew of the vision Zachariah had shown Dean, of Lucifer’s own promise in Carthage that Sam would says yes to him in Detroit.

When they left their safe house, Dean didn’t see any signs of civilization, not even destroyed ones. There had been no ruins anywhere around then, not the in the area they saw, so they were either just outside the city or there is literally nothing left of it.

What Dean thought was the ocean must have been Lake St. Claire, then. He wouldn’t have been able to tell, but then, he didn’t exactly pay attention.

“But he’s moving,” Jena suddenly says. “It’s hard to get a grip on him. I’m not exactly in Heaven’s favour anymore, you know.”

“Is he coming here?”

“No, he’s still in the states, he’s… ah.” With an annoyingly casual movement, Jena shook the hair out of her face. “He’s in Kansas. Close to where you were born. How appropriate.”

“What is he doing there?” Somehow, Dean doesn’t like that. It doesn’t feel like a coincidence to him.

“If you want my guess? He’s waiting for Michael to show up. He’s in Stull Cemetery, near Lawrence – apparently his choice for the last epic bitchfight with his brother. If we want to do anything, we should go now, before Michael decides to skip asking for your support with killing _your_ brother.”

“That’s all I want.” Finally, finally they are talking about the same thing. “Take me there, right now. I don’t care if you fuck off right after.”

“Oh, I will. No need to stay and witness you get killed, slowly, as a way to break any resistance Sam might still offer.” Jena says it like she doesn’t care but she has to care about _something_ , because she’s still here and she’s taking hold of Dean’s arm now, preparing to take them away, deliver Dean where he wants to be. He’ll see his brother the way he hates most soon, but so will she, and maybe that’s the reason why she stayed out of this conflict so long: because she does love Lucifer and doesn’t want to face what he’s become.

“Take me as well.” Castiel’s hand is on Jena’s arm before they can leave. Jena snorts softly in irritation but doesn’t protest. Dean does.

“You know there’s really no hope to speak of,” he says.

Cas just looks at him, and thanks to his better night vision be can probably actually see him. “Sam is my friend.”

“We’re probably gonna die.”

“Would you rather live?”

Live as the last person in the world? Live to see the paradise both Lucifer and Michael want to bring and know the price paid for it? Live knowing he’s been unable to protect Sam or win the battle they have been fighting for so long? Castiel is right – it was a silly question. “Hell, no.”

“Let’s go, then,” Jena sighs. “With some luck this will be over before dinner time.”

 

-

 

It’s not broad daylight when they arrive in Kansas, if only because such a thing simply does not exist anymore. It’s day, though, and even the washed out light that gets through the clouds is enough to make Dean blink for a few seconds since his eyes had gotten used to the darkness in Europe.

Jena said something about Lucifer waiting in a cemetery, but Dean wouldn’t recognize the place for one if he hadn’t known. There are no headstones anywhere he can see, just dead grass rustling as it moves in the soft breeze. Some lumps beneath it make him think that maybe there are overgrown markers underneath them but he isn’t sure and he doesn’t really care. Either way, there hasn’t been anyone buried in this place since a lot longer than the apocalypse has been lasting.

A bird flies off the branch of a dead tree with his wings flapping loudly. A raven, if Dean isn’t mistaken – it’s a big thing, and under different circumstances he would have regretted missing the chance to shoot it for dinner. As things are, he lets it go, and when it’s gone, Jena is gone as well.

She wasn’t kidding about not wanting to stick around for the showdown.

There is no one else around, only Castiel, standing a few steps behind him. Dean throws him a questioning look but the fallen angel shakes his head: he can’t make out anything either.

The grass rustles as they walk. Not far from them they can see a pile of stones that might have been a small church once, so they wander over to it and then onwards where the ground rises in a very soft slope, hoping to have a better view from higher up.

They find Lucifer in the middle of the open flied that is the cemetery. He’s standing tall and still as if waiting for something, but he turns when they approach. The second Dean has to brace himself is not enough.

The smile looks just so alien on Sam’s face; cold and calculating, amused and pitying. “Dean, Castiel, really,” he greets them. “I would like to say that I expected you to be smarter than to come, but that would be a lie. I did, however, expect my dear little brother to be smarter than to bring you.” He looks around as if looking for someone, but Jena is long gone. She was smart enough for that, after all.

Even the voice sounds wrong. It’s Sam’s, but speaking in a way Sam never would, like a bad imitation. Dean hated this before but he learns now that he didn’t really remember just how unsettling it was, seeing someone else in his brother’s skin. He wonders if Sam felt like this whenever he met Michael wearing Dean and feels even worse about himself.

The Devil has changed out of Sam’s jeans and oversized sweater and the coat Dean forced on him, the one Sam already knew he wouldn’t need. He’s not wearing a white suit, as he had in Zachariah’s version of the future (now long past) though, which is a relief, somehow. Instead, he’s dressed in something more like the clothes Sam was wearing when Dean first saw his corpse: black pants and shirt under a long and wide dark-blue vest held together with a broad leather band around his hips. It looks out of place, should look silly but only underlines the fact that Lucifer doesn’t belong here.

The clothes should fit tightly, but all they do is emphasize how skinny Sam is. Dean forces himself to look into his face and sees the old scars there, all of them. “You didn’t fix him,” he says without meaning to, his mouth just spurting out what he’s thinking. He expected Lucifer to make Sam’s body perfect again, all strong and unblemished and healthy.

Lucifer smiles his patronizing little smile and lets something like fondness flow into it as his – _Sam’s_ – long fingered hands glide down his body. “You would think so. Of course you would. But it’s not that easy. These scars – I appreciate them, more than you could ever understand. They are beautiful.”

Dean just stares at him. This isn’t what he wants to talk about, nor whom he wants to talk to. And he finds that, without ever realizing it, he has been looking forward to seeing Sam whole and healthy once again, not this fragile shell of the strong man he once was. It would have helped him remember that Sam is still strong and made him believe they have a chance.

“Even now your brother is fighting against me, never giving up.” Lucifer reaches beneath his belt, pulls out, to Dean’s distant surprise, the rings that could open his cage. “Trying to trap me again. I have to admire his resilience. It makes my conquest of him all that sweeter, and his brother’s scars are a testament of his struggle,” the Devil tells him, either oblivious of Dean’s thoughts or all too aware of them. “They tell of his strength to endure for so long, of his resistance. They are the greatest mark of my victory. Why should I remove them?”

Someone has speculated that he would feel this way about Sam. Was it Jena? Cas? Dean can’t remember. It must have been Jena. Only she would know her brother like that. It has to have been her.

Dean doesn’t know why, but it seems so important right now.

“You’re waiting for Michael,” Cas says, somewhere behind Dean, and pulls him back to the present. (Dean could ask him; Cas has to know if he said that or not.) “He’s not coming. There’s just us.”

Right there, just like that, something clicks into place. “That’s why you kept the rings with you,” Dean realizes. “You want to trap Michael in the cage like he once trapped you.”

“I prefer it to killing him, so I’ll do it if I can,” Lucifer admits openly. “But if I can’t, I will kill him. My plan is no secret you can sell to him to be my downfall, if that’s what you’re hoping.”

“Do you really think you can kill him?” Dean remembers what Gabriel told them once, about Michael and Lucifer and what they meant to each other. He’s also stalling for time. “He’s your brother and you love him. Even now you are looking for a way to win without losing him. So when the time comes and trapping him is not an option, do you really believe you can look into his eyes and deal the killing blow?”

“Don’t assume to know me.” Lucifer’s voice is calm, but his eyes bore into Dean in a way that promises death. “I want him in the cage so he can suffer for all eternity. So he will know what he did to me by banning me there. Do you think the cage was a nice place to be? Do you think it’s just bars? _Hell_ was built around it.” He straightens, his eyes becoming distant. “I know you’re stalling, Winchester. You hope you can distract me long enough for Sam to gain the upper hand and get me back to that place. You should be aware that he would come with me. And I would _hurt_ him. So here you are, doing everything you can to ensure your brother will suffer in ways your language has no words to describe, for all eternity, and you dare tell me something about love.”

He means it. He regards Dean with cold contempt, _on Sam’s behalf_ – Sam, whom he just promised to torture forever. There’s nothing about this that isn’t twisted, but Lucifer loves Sam, and right now, Lucifer hates Dean because Dean would rather let Sam suffer than save him. Dean hates himself, too. And he doesn’t want Sam to win, but that is not the point.

The point is that Sam is fighting and Dean cannot betray him.

“Sammy,” he whispers. “You can do it.”

“Oh, shut up already.” Lucifer doesn’t even move, or blink, or do anything at all, and yet Dean is flying backwards and landing in the grass (and for a millisecond or so he thinks he might be seeing something dark behind Sam’s skinny form, like the shadow of wings, three pairs of them stretching out toward the sky). Just him. Cas is still standing – turning to look how Dean is faring, turning back to Lucifer waiting for the next attack, then turning to Dean again when it doesn’t come, his eyes wide. Dean stares right back, understanding passing between them.

An outburst. Lucifer may look as irritated and impatient all he likes, but Dean and Cas know what this was. Sam is still with them, still fighting, and Lucifer feels it.

He wanted to shut Dean up because he can’t let him talk.

“Sam,” Cas says and is grabbed by the throat, lifted off the ground easily. For the first time since their reunion months ago Dean becomes really aware how much taller than Castiel his brother is, but it still looks odd, wrong, because all the muscle mass Sam once possessed is gone and he shouldn’t be able to lift anyone like that.

Castiel’s legs kick at the air and his hands claw at the fingers holding him up.

“This is Sam.” Lucifer sounds almost bored. “These are Sam’s hands and this is Sam watching as I crush your throat. He’s screaming and clawing and… oh, nothing happens.” A forceful movement and Cas is send flying, crashing against a tree and lying still. Dean wants to go check on him but his brother’s body walking towards him keeps all his attention focused.

His legs are shaking when he gets back on them, but he’s not sure if that’s because he got winded by the attack or because his heart is trying to kill him.

There isn’t actually anything he can do. He can’t fight Lucifer. He can’t open the cage and he can’t push him in. He can’t do anything to help. All he can do is what he came here for.

“Sammy,” he starts, and his throat, too, is enclosed by a hard, unforgiving hand. “Sam, it’s okay,” he manages anyway, sort of; his lips are moving but he’s not sure he’s producing any sound at all. “It’s gonna be okay, Sam. I’m here.”

“And what is that going to change?” Lucifer spits. “All you do is make me angry. I’ve tried to be patient, I really did, for Sam’s sake, but you’re seriously pissing me off by now.” He throws Dean down, to the ground right beneath his feet, and kicks him in the chest. It knocks the breath out of him. It could have killed him if Lucifer had wanted that. “If you say one more word, Dean Winchester, I will kill you. I will kill you with your brother’s hands and I will make him feel every bone breaking between his fingers. I will let him rest for all eternity with the memory of your eyeballs turning to mush under his thumbs.”

He means it. His foot is resting on Dean’s chest, the pressure steadily building like a promise, and Dean is sorry, so sorry. He wants to give up just to let Sam have the easier fate of eternal oblivion in Lucifer’s care, but he can’t, because he made a promise. To his brother and to himself.

“I’m here,” he repeats and it’s at the same time the hardest and the easiest words ever spoken. “I’m not gonna leave you. I’m not gonna leave you, Sammy, _please_.”

Lucifer’s face twists into an ugly grimace. He bends down, lifts Dean up by the lapels of his coat, punches him right down again. “I warned you,” he says. “All this is your fault. Sam will hate you.” His fist hits again. Not full force, because he wants this to last. He could have killed Dean with a single punch but he wants this to last and Dean is so sorry. He wants to tell his brother he loves him but what he says is just over and over “I’m here,” and “I’m not gonna leave you,” and it means the same thing in the end. (Sam knows that, he does.)

Another blow. Dean thinks something in his face breaks and there’s a lot of pain, but it doesn’t matter. He wants to say ‘I’m sorry.’ Instead he says, “It’s gonna be okay.”

Nothing is going to be okay. Sam can’t make it, there never was a chance. Dean doesn’t want him to feel like he let him down. He just wants him to know that Dean is there for him, here, at the end.

So he keeps his eyes on Sam’s no matter how painful it is to have Lucifer look back at him through them. Somewhere in there is Sam and he can see Dean even if Dean cannot see him. “I’m here.” It’s just a whisper. Maybe Sam can’t hear him. A blow hits his temple and Dean has to close his eyes for the blood running into them. Not much longer now. Lucifer is too angry to really hold back. It’s pathetic, but it’s all Dean can do: be there as long as he can.

The next blow might be the last one, or the one after that. Tears sting his eyes; it’s neither the pain nor fear that make him cry. And Lucifer is playing now, found some self-control, maybe – the next blow doesn’t come and doesn’t come. Instead the hands around his coat let go and Dean falls down heavily. His head rings and vertigo overcomes him. Maybe he passes out for a second.

“Dean,” a voice says. It’s the same voice Lucifer is using, the same fucking voice, but this is Sam speaking. Dean knows, because he would recognize him anywhere.

“Dean,” Sam repeats. “It’s okay.”

‘No,’ Dean thinks.

 

-

 

He opens his eyes and Sam is already holding the rings in his hands. Those hands tremble as he throws the cage’s key to the ground but his voice is steady when he says words Dean would never have been able to remember after hearing them just once. There is a growling sound like distant thunder and the ground falls away, opening up to take his brother away.

Sam looks at him and he’s crying too, but he’s smiling as he says, “It’s gonna be okay, Dean. I got him.”

 

-

 

A strong, icy wind is blowing up from the endlessly black abyss and tears at Sam’s hair as he closes his eyes and spreads his arms. Dean watches him fall backwards as if in slow motion. Time seems to stand still and then suddenly Sam is gone and everything is over.

A scream sits deep in Dean’s throat and doesn’t move from there while he scrambles to his feet. He’s not making a sound. The hole is closing quickly, but it’s still open just wide enough when Dean gets there.

Arms close around his middle from behind, hold him back, and the scream in his throat finally is heard; it doesn’t escape, doesn’t want to move, but Dean forces it out because he can’t breathe around the pain, and when the sound leaves him it tears something up in the process.

Nothing is better afterwards, but his throat closes and he can’t scream again. He claws at the arms holding him, throws himself forward, but the arms are too strong and in a second the hole will be gone as if it had never been there.

“No,” he chokes out. “Let me go.”  But the arms hold tight.

“No, Dean.” Cas is choking as well. “You can’t.”

“ _Let me go!_ ” Dean yells. Castiel doesn’t answer. He just keeps holding him back and Dean doesn’t understand why he would do that. What does he care? Lucifer is gone. They won. They fucking _won_! Only Dean is losing everything.

The hole is almost gone, the cage almost closed. Dean wouldn’t fit through the opening even if he could reach it now. It’s over. It’s too late.

He sinks to the ground and sobs. Castiel’s arms are still around him, but he’s no longer holding him back. He’s just holding him.

At the very last moment before the hole closes, there is a light.

 

-

 

It’s bright and white and for a terrible second Dean thinks it’s Hell shining through, like the light that had broken out from the cage when it had opened in that chapel in Maryland. But of course that had not been Hell either but Lucifer, shining brighter than any sun and _coming_.

Now it’s just a single bust of light; Dean gets the impression of giant, bright wings flapping once, far too large to fit through the rapidly closing opening in the ground and then it’s gone and it doesn’t matter what it was because it’s over and Sam is unreachable to him, as he will ever be.

Afterwards, there is only silence.

 

-

 

The silence lasts for seconds, and those seconds once again prove Dean wrong in his belief that the more terrible moment of his life has already happened long ago. He’s slumped on the ground and Cas is still holding him even though there is no more reason to hold him back. Dean thinks of taking his knife and sliding his throat while his fingers claw listlessly at the dead grass, but even to that there would be no point.

The silence ends with the thud of something falling from above. Looking up startled and nearly insensate with grief, Dean finds Jena crouching in the grass where the hole used to be, Sam’s motionless body sprawled in her arms.

“What?” he asks, when he finds his voice.

“Gabriel.” Castiel sounds strained and his arms around Dean tighten once again. “If that is Lucifer-”

“It’s not,” Jena interrupts him, and her voice is almost gentle, as is her hand when she moves to brush a long strand of hair out of the face of the man she is holding. “It’s just Sam.”

 

-

 

Sam is breathing. He doesn’t look alive, but he’s breathing – Dean can see it when he looks very closely and hear it when everyone is quiet and he holds his own breath to make out the thin rattle of his brother’s. Sam’s eyes are closed and his face pale and he is completely limp, but he seems unharmed, on the outside. All the scars he was sporting before are still there but there are no new wounds from whatever happened to him.

“What did you do?” Castiel whispers, his voice reverent. He reaches out to touch Sam’s hair but hesitates at the last second, letting his hand drop.

Jena smiles, looking almost amused. “What else? I gripped him tight and raised him from perdition.”

“But how? How just him and not Lucifer, too?”

“Because the cage was designed for an angel and the moment Lucifer touched it he was torn from his host. I managed to snatch Sam in just that moment, before the cage could close behind him forever.”

It sounds easy. It probably wasn’t. Dean doesn’t care. He reaches out and Jena willingly gives Sam to him, Dean’s whole body sagging with too many emotions when he feels the familiar weight resting in his arms. Sam is cool and still but not like a corpse and Dean can’t bring himself to look away from his face; the slightly parted lips, the closed eyes.

Behind him, Castiel says, “Thank you.”

Jena doesn’t reply and Dean couldn’t have cared less if she did. He pulls Sam’s head against his shoulder and holds it there, focusing on the only question he cares about right now. “Is he ever going to wake up?”

“Yes. It won’t be long. No side effects, too. Lucifer is all gone and Sam is all there.”

“So he will be okay?” Castiel asks. Jena hesitates just long enough for Dean to know the answer.

“He will be as okay as he was before,” she finally says.

Dean closes his eyes. His relief was all-consuming; a part of him hasn’t even accepted yet that this has happened – not that he lost Sam and not that he has got him back. He can’t deal with this, he can’t.

“He was not very okay to begin with,” Cas points out. He sounds careful, apprehensive. Jena, still crouching in the grass, sighs and reaches out to Sam and Dean allows her to touch him, to gently lower him to the ground together with Dean, so he’s lying stretched out between them. She’s touching Sam’s chest, his forehead, but those are casual touches without meaning. She’s not doing anything.

“I haven’t been able to heal Sam properly before, and I am unable to do so now, for the same reasons,” she tells them. Dean doesn’t know why he’s disappointed. He should have known, and yet, the desperation that has been banished when he saw the archangel carry his brother out of Hell comes back like a hole of his own to fall in as he realizes what this means.

“So he’s going to die anyway?” Dean can’t keep the hint of hysteria out of his voice. Hearing it surprises him when inside he only feels numb. It’s like his body hasn’t realized yet that he doesn’t have any energy left to feel.

“Yes.” Jena isn’t one to sugar coat things. “However,” she adds. “Lucifer healed some of the damage when he possessed Sam. It wasn’t much, though. He didn’t do it on purpose – why would he? The damage didn’t affect him. But a little bit of healing happened through his grace leaking into the cracks.”

Dean doesn’t want this hope when it’s going to be crushed again. He wants Sam to wake up so they can walk away from there and see how far they can go.

Castiel takes over the talking again. “What exactly does that mean?” His hand found its way to Sam’s hand after all and he’s holding on to it as if afraid that if he let go, Sam would just sink through the round again and be gone. (Dean’s own hands are clamped around Sam’s arm, holding so tightly that he has to leave marks under the black sleeve of his shirt.)

“I guess you’ll have to wait and see,” Jena says with faint amusement. Then she turns sombre again. “He’s not going to live forever, in any case.”

“So he could fall over tomorrow?” Dean asks numbly.

“Dean, dear, you all could fall over tomorrow, for whatever reason. Baring accident and further illness, through, I would give him a couple of years.” She lifts her hands in a placating gesture when Dean looks up sharply. “It’s no guarantee, through.”

Years. That’s… that could mean anything, from twelve months to three decades. It’s better, in any case, than nothing. But it’s not enough because it’s not the most important question. “What happens then? After? Can you still get him into Heaven now he’s been possessed by Lucifer? _Will_ you?”

“I can. I don’t know if I have to, and basically, I think I just paid every depth I owed him for defeating Lucifer when I saved him from the cage, _but_ ,” she hurries to add when both Dean and Cas glare at her. “I’ll keep my promise. Sam will go to Heaven, and so will you. That is one thing you won’t have to worry about.”

“Me?” Dean didn’t really worry about that until now. It’s not that he feels any more certain he would be let into Heaven than he was with Sam, but making sure his little brother isn’t going to Hell was taking up too much of his attention to worry about his own fate. It’s good to know that he won’t be separated from him forever.

Good. It’s good.

It’s all good.

“What about Michael?” Castiel asks.

“Well.” Jena pulls a face. “There’s that.”

 

-

 

Michael knows Lucifer is gone. He must have felt it the moment the cage closed to lock him away forever and now he thinks about it, Dean is more than a little surprised that he didn’t show up yet to tear them all apart out of spite.

Michael never wanted Lucifer back in the cage, he wanted him dead. And most of all, he wanted to do it himself.

“I will take care of Michael,” Jena promises as she stands. Then she leans in and brushes Dean’s forehead with her fingers, the movement so surprising he can’t even flinch back. Adrenaline rushes through him, but whatever he expected, it doesn’t happen. All that happens is that the pain that filled him from Lucifer’s beating disappears.

It seems almost unfair that he shouldn’t even keep a scar.

“What, you are going to kick him in the balls?” Dean is surprised he manages so many words on something he cares about so little. Except he does care. If Michael wants revenge, Sam is the one he will go after.

“We will talk. He will understand that it is too late. No one else will be tricked into opening the cage, even if it were still possible. Lucifer and the final battle are out of his reach. It is, I believe, about time my dear brother learned to think for himself instead of following foreordained paths.” She smirks. “Maybe I can simply convince him that thinking for himself _is_ the foreordained path our father wants him to follow.”

Dean should probably say something to that. He would like Michael’s balls to be kicked, after all. He wants Michael’s head on a stick, to be completely honest, and he wants to be the one sticking it there, but even that desire is forgotten when Sam stirs.

The first thing he does is let out an ever-so-quiet moan, and Dean’s hands are on him immediately. So are Castiel’s. Dean half-expected him to do the talking in his stead, maybe demand some violence or ask what will happen when Michael doesn’t see reason, or ask what will happen to _him_ now because he’s a fallen angel and perhaps he can go back to Heaven after all now the side he chose turned out to be the winning one, but all Cas says when he leans closer is “Sam?”

Sam moans again, his eyes fluttering. It seems that for once Jena was right when she said he would wake soon and Dean’s heart flutters like a bird while at the same time it’s getting hard to breathe. She said he would be fine, that there would be no consequences of the possession, but he won’t know until Sam opened his eyes and looked at him.

Sam doesn’t open his eyes just yet. After the first attempt at waking he seems to give up for the moment, all tension leaving his body as it goes limp again. At the same time, Jena takes a step back. “I believe it’s time for me to go.”

“Wait.” There’s something else Dean needs to tell her, but when he looks up she’s already gone.

It’s okay. He can tell Sam and that will be just as well. He doesn’t trust her promises anyway, and Sam’s stirring again and…

…there’s a hand on Dean’s back. He turns and sees Cas, who smiles at him – a real smile that reaches his eyes. Dean realizes, that moment, that he has never seen him do that before.

Then Dean turns back to his brother, gently pulling him up until Sam’s head rests in the crook of his arm, and that’s where Sam opens his eyes.

At first he seems confused more than anything, then, for a second, there’s panic written all over him and he tries to jerk out of Dean’s arms. But under his brother’s soothing touches and whispered assurances, he calms down quickly and eventually, when his eyes fall on Dean’s, there is recognition in them, and amazement.

“Hey,” Dean says. It’s lame, but it’s a start. “Looks like Jena was good for something after all. She pulled you out at the last minute, and just remind me, when you’re up and running again, to kick you in the ass for pulling that stunt on me.”

Sam doesn’t say anything in return, his eyes travelling between Dean and Cas and the empty field around them, still not quite comprehending, so Dean takes mercy on him and adds with a grin that somehow snuck on his face when he wasn’t looking, “Yeah, Lucifer’s gone for good. It’ over. Oh, and by the way, we’ve won.”


	20. Epilogue

The way from Kansas to Florida is long. It takes them months to get there – Castiel knows that both Dean and Sam quickly lose track of time when every day seems to be the same, but he could have told them that they were walking for four months, three weeks and three days by the time they reach their destination, if they asked him. They never do.

The world looks the same as it did before. The dust lingers in the sky, the ground barely hosts any life and the cities are in ruins as ever before. The three of them have to hunt for their food and collect their clothes from the rags civilization left behind. They sleep in caves and curled around campfires. And yet, something has changed since the cage opened and swallowed what should never have left it in the first place.

The weather changes more often now. Some days it’s raining, sometimes it’s windy, then cold, the next day warmer, where before the atmosphere seemed frozen in one state for years or decades. The temperatures are steadily climbing, like a long winter turning into spring. It is, however, the only outward change there is and the only physical sign that something has been lifted off this world that was suffocating it before.

It’s not just Dean, Sam, and Castiel feeling it. They don’t come across other people often, but when they do, the others are more relaxed, less willing to sense betrayal or fight for their life at the slightest provocation. People are still cautious, though – the angels and most demons have left the earth, maybe for good, but no one came and told the people from a ray of light that they have been saved. It will be a long time before they realize that attacks and possessions simply do not happen anymore.

They tell the news to anyone they happen to meet and Castiel can see the willingness to believe them even if there is no proof. The people just know something has changed, and they are so ready for hope.

Dean never says “My brother saved the world,” but he radiates the words with every breath he takes in the company of strangers until Castiel thinks they simply have to understand it. But they don’t. The three of them move on from the chance meetings, sometimes carrying more food than before, sometimes less, and the people they leave behind are none the wiser whom they have just met and let go.

They are not in a hurry. Sometimes they stay for days in one place, sometimes they walk almost without a break, until Sam, for all that he is better than before, cannot go on and forces them to stop. He then lies awake when he should be resting, fighting to draw breath into struggling lungs. It happens especially on cold days, and Dean always hovers and chides when Sam is down, acting like a concerned parent but overdoing it so much it becomes annoying. Castiel believes he does it on purpose.

He can easily see the fear in his friend’s eyes whenever his brother is not well. It echoes Castiel’s own, but Sam always recovers and they travel on.

One time they camp by a river for a while, and Castiel finds an old, wrecked ship at the bank – old, but not older than a few years. It’s salvageable, so Dean salvages it, because that is – as Castiel has realized early in their friendship – what he does. It takes two weeks, and in that time nothing bad happens to them. No attacks, not hunger because they find enough food in the scarce trees around them, no hard weather. In that time Castiel can see, as he watches his friends go about their daily life, that they are ready to settle and rest.

He is quite ready for that himself. After all these years of living with a specific purpose that kept him moving, it is a strange and slightly frightening urge to have.

When the boat is finished, they get into it and go down the river for as long as they can. When the river branches east they take that branch; the water there seems calmer than the main arm and for the longest time, Castiel believes their way to be random. The journey on the water is quite enjoyable. Sam gets a fever once, but it’s not bad and they don’t have to stop travelling for it. Leaning back and watching the world move past them without exerting themselves is a very welcome change to the years of walking that lie past all of them.

They eat a lot of fish, rest at the banks when it becomes too dark to navigate their boat. Once, a storm forces them to seek shelter in a makeshift tent for days, but even that does nothing to lessen the strange emotional high Castiel finds himself on since Lucifer’s downfall. It feels as if he were walking through a dream.

Eventually, the river turns wilder and finally becomes too rough to safely travel on. They turn back to walking, find a street and follow it. Their walk may not be easier than before the end of the war, but it feels like it is. They pass cities and sometimes come across towns full of humans only just beginning to trust the peace that has come upon them. Castiel half-expects the brothers to lead their way there, make friends and settle in one of the houses that are just waiting for someone to need them, but they always bypass the towns and keep going, without ever stopping to talk about their plans for the future.

Perhaps it has to do with the fact that none of them ever thought they would have a future, and now they do, they are lost in it.

Castiel doesn’t know they are aiming for Florida until he sees the forest he and Dean once crossed on their way to temporary shelter, and even then he isn’t sure Dean led them here on purpose. Maybe he did, maybe he didn’t. It doesn’t matter and Castiel never asks.

Sam has never been to this place before, not consciously. The first time Castiel came here, Sam was resting nestled in the remnants of the angel’s grace. Sometimes Castiel feels the loss where he used to be, but it only ever lasts until the next time Sam smiles, or laughs, or looks at something in wonder like he can’t believe it exists.

The forest is as threatening as it was before. Perhaps Castiel had expected that to have changed. He must have – how else can he explain the disappointment, and the unsettlement that comes over him while crossing it, even though he knows very well that they will have left it behind long before the sun has sunk so low it becomes unsafe?

Sam has never been here before. He doesn’t know the meaning of this place but he is much more sensitive to its nature than Dean is. By the time they see the light of the open meadow shimmering through the final rows of trees, he almost runs to get out of there. Afterwards, he doesn’t speak for an hour, and it takes him a long time to fully take in the beauty of the land they have reached.

“It’s safe here,” Dean just says, sounding apologetic but not sorry. Castiel understands what he means; the angels and most demons are gone and there is little to be feared from the few monsters that stuck around – not for them. But monsters are not the only dangerous creatures that inhabit this planet. Humans will always hurt one another in some way, especially humans who have nothing and grew up in a world that favoured the ruthless for survival and punished the naïve.

Night falls, but they keep walking for a while longer. The forest is harmless behind them, but for Sam’s sake they keep going until it is well out of sight. When they stop they sit in the grass for a long time, listening to the silence that is only interrupted by the wind whispering in the leaves of nearby trees; trees that are just trees, with nothing threatening about them. After a while, even Sam relaxes. He sleeps in the grass that night, his head resting on his brother’s lap, and Dean rests with his back leaning against Castiel’s, who stays awake until morning.

Soon after, they get in sight of the cave and the abandoned farm nearby and stand on the flat, even ground for a long time before moving towards the house. Castiel has never entered it before. The first time he came here he got close, but something – an old instinct that went beyond his nature as an angel – had told him to turn away and he had listened to it. There is a reason, after all, why this land is empty.

Now the feeling of dread doesn’t come, no matter how close they come. Other than the forest, this place has recovered from whatever happened here, or maybe whatever lay on this place simply disappeared together with the apocalypse.

The house is sturdy. It will probably still stand here after another two hundred years have gone by, but the furniture has suffered a lot, the carpets are in a bad shape and the wallpaper is peeling off the walls. It will take time to turn this into a comfortably home, but as Castiel watches Dean wander around with a contemplating expression on his face, taking in everything and already thinking about how to make it better, he finds that this house might be exactly what they need.

It’s a large house, offering much more space than they require for three people with no possessions. From the number of bedrooms they can tell that a large family has lived here once, but Castiel’s fear of finding the mortal remains of the former inhabitants in their new home doesn’t come true. Everyone who lived here is simply gone, and there is no doubt that they will never come back.

They spend a week in a makeshift camp in the living room, not much better than any place they slept in since the world ended, and use their days to explore the farm. There are stables that are all empty and won’t ever be needed for animals again, and Dean says they should tear them down, separate the wood into planks they can use for repairs in the house and those that are too damaged by weather and time so they can burn those. It’s sensible. There are two intact windows that Dean hopes he can use to replace broken windows in the house, but it’ll be difficult because the glass doesn’t have the right size. They decide to keep the shed, because it’s mostly intact, and many of the tools inside are still use- or at least salvageable.

The meadow stretches on almost to the horizon in one direction. In another it ends in a forest (harmless, the trees barely clinging to life but slowly getting stronger with every day) and the North has the rocky hills where Castiel’s cave is located. On the third day, while Dean is working on making the first room of the house inhabitable, Castiel visits his old shelter together with Sam and they wash themselves at the spring between the rocks. Afterwards they gather up the furs and tools from the cave they can still use and then they sit in the opening for a long time, looking down at their new home as Castiel tells his friend of how he came here the first time and how he came here with Dean. It is, altogether, a deceptively boring story that makes Sam smile.

 

-

 

The nearest settlement is about a day’s walk from the forest that keeps everyone away and sometimes Castiel or Dean go there to trade deerskin for food they can’t get on their little farm, or for medicine neither of them knows how to make, or for clothes. Sometimes Dean goes and works for their supplies, fixing carriages or the water pump the townspeople use to get water from their well. He jokes, once, that he always knew he’d end up as a mechanic one day. But they only go if they have to, the way too long and difficult to make for fun, and while it’s not as dangerous as it used to be, there are risks and the ones staying behind are always tense until the one making the trip has returned. They always have to go alone; Sam doesn’t leave their land, and without ever talking about it Castiel and Dean agree never to leave him alone.

The townspeople get used to them. After a while they stop asking where they are living, instead just accepting that there is someone around who has knowledge that was lost to them and taking advantage of that in exchange for some supplies they can easily spare. For all they know, Dean and Castiel are two eremites who live beyond the western hills and the names Dean gave them are, once again, Bruce and Clark; no doubt another reference Castiel doesn’t understand.

In the first winter, Castiel brings milk back from the town. He and Dean, they have been drinking it every now and then when visiting, but the trip is so long that during the warmer days, they couldn’t bring it back to Sam before it went sour. He thinks Sam will appreciate the change in his diet, but when he arrives after half a week away from home, Sam is sick and can’t keep anything down.

The next spring, Dean is gone for a week and he brings back a cow.

 

-

 

The one cow becomes two cows half a year later. None of them have any intention of starting a herd, but it’s nice to have company and the cows are happier if they aren’t lonely. There is nothing left of the stable, so Dean transforms one of the unused rooms at the far side of the house into one. The cows don’t seem to mind either way.

During the winter, whenever he isn’t too sick, Sam writes down the history of the apocalypse in neat, legible letters in a journal Dean brought back from one of his trips, and when he is done, he writes down facts about the world that was; things now forgotten by those who weren’t there to see them. This is how they pay for the second cow. The farmer who gave the animal to them considers herself a historian, and she promises chicken in exchange for more tales from the past. So Sam writes. And when there is nothing they want or need, he still writes, whenever he can.

He’s sick a lot this the first winter. He has been sick before, every now and then, but in the winter it gets worse, to the point where Dean and Castiel are sitting by his bedside day and night and Castiel can see Dean try to prepare himself for the inevitable loss. It doesn’t come; Sam recovers, slowly. Illness strikes again and he recovers again and as the days get longer and warmer, he gets stronger until he’s almost as healthy as the year before.

They welcome the spring dreading the next winter.

When Sam got gravely ill the first time and could hardly breathe through his failing lungs and hardly think through the fever, Dean took his hand and told him, “I don’t know if Gabriel will keep his promise and take you personally, or if there’s gonna be a reaper waiting for you, but when the time comes, you don’t go anywhere without me, you get it? Stall for time, whatever, just wait for me. I’ll be right behind you.”

Sam is so sick he can’t argue and Castiel suspects Dean timed it like that on purpose.

He still has the book with Sam’s final messages to Dean, written in Enochian for a goodbye that never happened. Dean will not read them – after Sam is gone, there will be no time, and before there would be no point. Castiel keeps them anyway.

He is the one they will leave behind.

Dean doesn’t think of that, of course. Castiel never expected him to, because as much as they are friends and love each other, Dean’s focus will always be only on Sam in this regard. If Dean did consider Castiel’s position in all this, he would feel bad for leaving him but do it all the same. Castiel would not wish him to do otherwise. There is no point bringing it up.

Sam is another matter. Perhaps it is because they spend so much time together, or simply because Sam is Sam, but he worries, and he speaks about it. He doesn’t like the thought of Dean dying, even if there would be no point for him to stay, but he accepts the facts as they are when Castiel explains to him that it is what Dean wishes and needs and that Sam should do him the favour of not forcing him into an unhappy life with misguided requests. Afterwards he asks, “What will become of you?”

“Don’t worry about me. I spend a lot of time alone. I am with you and Dean because I want to be, not because I need to be.”

“But what will happen to you?” Sam’s eyes are large and earnest and so concerned. “Do you even age at all? Will you just go on like this, forever? Can you… can you go home? Ever?”

“If by home you mean Heaven, then yes, I can. But I can never be an angel again.”

“But how–”

“I can die, Sam,” Castiel reminds him gently. “I may not age, but I can get injured. I can get killed. If that happens, I may go to Heaven. Gabriel explained it to me; he visited my dreams the first night of winter. I chose this world and mankind over by brothers so I am to stick around as long as possible. If I kill myself or allow someone else to kill me where it is not necessary, I will simply cease being. But if I stay in this world until my time is up, however long that may be, I can enter Heaven like any mortal soul. I might even see you and Dean again.”

Sam smiles at him, small but genuine. “I’d like that.”

Castiel smiles back. “So would I.”

 

-

 

The second winter, Sam’s illness gets worse. It starts sooner and keeps a hold of him longer, barely granting him a break in between. Castiel is convinced that he will not make it this time and thinks of the long, empty and dark months ahead, but Sam pulls through. Even though he remains weak through most of spring and summer, he takes care of the small vegetable garden beside the window to his bedroom, frowning over the cucumbers’ refusal to grow longer than the span of his hand and smiling when he presents them with the first potatoes from the plants he planted the year before. While Dean and Castiel bring him most of the seeds he needs, they never touch the garden. It is Sam’s to care for and be proud of. It’s a simple but beautiful thing.

The house, on the other hand, is mostly Dean’s; while the other two help him where they can, they mostly just follow his instructions, and often he tells them to go away and let him work because they aren’t doing it right. In the end they never clean up more than the rooms on the ground floor, and just four of them are redone to the extent that they can feel comfortable in them: three bedrooms and the living room, where they also keep all the books they could salvage. Dean remodelled the kitchen so that they can have an open flame where the cooking plated used to be, and the bathroom has been adjusted to a life without canalisation. The living room has a fireplace and during the worst of winter, Sam hardly ever leaves it.

The seasons came back the moment the apocalypse ended and all the angels left the world alone, yet it’s not as it was before. Before, it very rarely snowed in Florida, and certainly not as much as it does now, when sometimes Dean and Cas have a hard time making their way through the snow to the forest when they run out of wood. In summer it’s warm, but rarely ever hot, though sometimes it’s so humid just being outside is exhausting, even for someone who’s healthy. They sky remains forever covered, never letting through any actual rays of sunlight, but sometimes, when Sam is working in his garden where the plants try so valiantly to grow despite the bad conditions, Castiel thinks that it’s not too bad that the cover of clouds and dust is protecting them from the sun and keeping the temperatures bearable.

And yet there are no words for what he feels in the fall of their third year when Dean suddenly calls out and points to the sky, and Castiel follows his gaze and sees washed out blue shimmer through a tear in the veil that covers the world. For long seconds they simply stand and stare, and it’s only when the gab begins to close that Dean overcomes his shock and runs back to the house to alert Sam.

But it’s too late. Sam was inside, working on his account of the history of the United States and missed the small miracle that happened above them. By the time Dean dragged him out, the cover of clouds is as tick as ever and the blue sky lost once again.

The happiness Castiel felt at the sight is diminished greatly by the look of crippling disappointment on Sam’s face. Just like Castiel he is aware that this may well have been an isolated incident that will never happen again.

But it does. A month passes and the days have grown cool and dark; it’s not long to the first frost, but the end of fall has a few mild days left for them and on one of them Castiel returns from milking their cows to find Sam kneeling in the high grass behind the house, staring up at the sky. There is nothing but clouds when Castiel looks, but the expression on his friend’s face tells him what he has seen. So he sits beside Sam and they hug, and then Sam cries into his shoulder, but he also laughs, and all is fine.

The winter comes without the sky being seen again. It lasts for weeks longer than the last one and all of them are happy when it is over. The first warm day, Dean carries his brother, weakened by fever and breathing with effort, out to the tree overlooking the rocky hills that contain Castiel’s cave, wraps him in blankets and together they enjoy the air they all sorely missed in the months when even Dean and Castiel only ever went outside to feed and milk the cows in their makeshift stable at the other end of the house, and a few times to hunt when they were short on meat.

In the previous years, the first warm day of the year marked a turn for the better in Sam’s health. This time it doesn’t. His fever lingers for another two weeks and he doesn’t stop coughing blood. It’s almost summer by the time the tense worry that lies over their small family lifts some, but while Sam smiles more and is obviously living up with the life on their farm, it is obvious that his body can’t keep up anymore.

But they keep ignoring the problem as they have always ignored it, simply because there is nothing they can do.

 

-

 

Their life is deceptively simple. It’s made of making sure they have enough to eat, making sure they have whatever natural medicine they can get their hands on, making sure their cows are happy, and in the winter they also have to make sure they are warm enough. Castiel would have imagined once that a life such as this would be boring, but it never is. He has lived for too long in a very similar fashion, but on his own and constantly on the run. This is very enjoyable in comparison. He has come to appreciate the time he can spend with his friends or sit underneath the tree and watch the world slowly change, knowing it will still be there next year.

Dean gets restless sometimes, on slow days, but he is able to turn this restlessness into something useful. There is no need for him to go keep moving in search of a hunt, not when there are repairs to be made, errands to run and things to build. He has always been someone who liked to build, to create; to work and see the result of that work. And he has a lot of practical creative energy that he puts into designing and constructing a simply pipeline to get water directly from the spring to the house, and a small wagon that’s pulled by a cow and helps them get wood and the game they hunted for dinner from the edge of the forest to the farm.

Though he never mentions it, it is obvious that Sam wishes he could do more to help. But he never regained even half of his former strength and with every sickness he makes it through he get a little weaker overall. On good days he likes to help his brother with whatever he’s doing, but often even taking care of his garden, small as it is, is taking all he has.

Most of his time he spends writing, drawing maps from memory, or asking Castiel questions about the history of the Earth; the things that no human has ever seen. Sam is writing not only about history, he’s also working on an almanac of monsters, because that they have become rare doesn’t mean no one will ever encounter them again. Also, he’s writing down a list of simple recipes for the food that most people can get without problems, and things he learned from his garden, more for himself than anyone else. In one journal that he holds especially dear, he writes down stories he’s read or heard so they won’t be lost when he and Dean are gone.

He sometimes adds some brief notes for the villagers when Dean or Castiel take his accounts with them to the world outside, but when he is asked, during a particularly healthy phase, if he would like to come along, he declines. Sam has no desire to deal with other people. Sometimes it is hard enough for him to interact with his brother and his friend.

Some days are better than others but his problems never completely go away. There are, for instance, the nightmares. A lot of them. Sometimes whatever Sam sees in his dreams lingers all through the day, making him withdraw from the others and flinch whenever he is touched. He never talks much anymore, is much quieter than he used to be, even on good days, but it happens that he doesn’t speak a word in days.

Sometimes there are long phases in which Sam can’t sleep undisturbed at all, tries to go without sleep and inevitably makes himself sick. Those times are difficult for all of them; Dean’s attempts to make his brother sleep and get his needed rest end up making Sam withdraw further into himself. When he does sleep, Dean holds him but he cannot always keep the nightmares away. When illness finally hits, Sam is mostly unconscious and still the nightmares come. Castiel can only watch them suffer. He takes care of them as best he can and wonders if he is making a difference.

The only comfort both he and Dean can take is from the knowledge that the dreams are just dreams. Lucifer cannot touch Sam anymore.

And in comparison to everything that happened before, these are still the best days of Castiel’s life.

 

-

 

The fourth winter is the hardest. Not because it is colder than the ones before or because the snow is piling too high to move far from the house, because it isn’t. Not because Sam fell ill with the first chilly days of fall and is barely able to leave his bed for almost two months, because that is not something they aren’t used to. It’s not even the hacking coughs that keep them all awake through the night or the blood on Sam’s lips or the, thin, painful gasps for air that substitute for breathing at the worst of times.

No, what makes this one worse is that Dean becomes ill as well. Through the four years since the apocalypse ended, he has sometimes caught a small cold, or complained about a headache for a day or two, and once he had cut his hand and it had hurt quite badly for a week and given him a light fever, but he has never before felt so bad he couldn’t leave the bed.

Sam had been feverish and barely coherent for days, both Dean and Castiel fighting to make him at least drink so dehydration wouldn’t make it worse. Even though Sam had been returned from the cage free of all demon blood and spared the withdrawal, solid food never stopped being a problem for him. He can eat, but never gets down much before he feels sick. It took them some time on their way to Florida to figure out what he can keep down, and find a balance between eating enough not to starve and not eating too much so he didn’t throw it all up again. When he’s sick, eating stops completely and it’s all they can do to make him drink broth and teas while his already skinny frame shrinks down to nothing.

Taking care of Sam for any length of time takes a lot out of them in between all the other things they have to do. They do it gladly, but the constant worry and the lack of sleep do take their toll.  Castiel has a hard time reminding Dean to eat and sleep whenever he can and in the process tends to forget his own body’s needs. He doesn’t require as much sleep as his human friends, though, and he cannot get sick.

Dean can, and he does. It starts with a scratching feeling in his throat, soon joined by a dry, ugly sounding cough, a headache and a fever. The worst, however, is the separation from his brother – Sam’s immune system is already compromised and they can’t risk him catching what Dean has. And Dean accepts that, he does. He willingly retreats to the other bedroom as soon as he can no longer deny that he’s getting sick, but it doesn’t make him happy. It doesn’t make Sam happy, who is already so sick himself that he can’t understand why his brother is not with him anymore. In bad moments, half waking from nightmares, he thinks Dean is dead. In the worse moments he is convinced that nothing that happened since he came back to life was real and that Dean is still possessed by Michael.

He cries a lot.

Dean, as the fever rises, becomes increasingly restless and worried and plain impossible to stand. Castiel spends most of his time taking care of Sam, but he needs to look after Dean as well, keep him fed and comfortable and warm, and whenever he’s there, Dean snaps at him to go away, look after Sam, not waste any time with the older brother. He’s also miserable and needs more time and attention than Castiel can spare, which causes his sickness to drag on longer than it would have had to, under better circumstances. Between his two ill friends, Castiel doesn’t get any rest at all. They run out of meat after two weeks because he can’t leave them alone long enough to hunt and barely has the time of day to milk and feed the cows. By the time Dean slowly gets better, Castiel is so exhausted he can barely stand, but he hangs on until Dean is well enough to be allowed back with his brother before he collapsed face first onto a blanket on the floor and allows his consciousness to simply switch off.

Sam’s fever has finally broken when Castiel wakes up to find Dean curled up beside his brother and fast asleep. But it’s another week before the younger brother can keep down any kind of food, and when Castiel lifts him off the bed to change the sheets, he is shocked by how light he has become. Sam didn’t have any weight to lose to begin with.

Even though his friend is slowly getting better, Castiel knows it would need a miracle for him to survive the next year. He doesn’t mention it. Sam knows it as well as he does, and Dean…

Castiel sometimes catches Dean looking at Sam with a mix of worry and hope on his face. He’s deluding himself. Every year they expected to be the last and yet Sam still lives. Dean has come to believe that Sam will keep proving their expectations wrong.

For Sam, it will be a relief to go. Castiel has no illusions about that when he listens to his friend’s painful coughs, tries to soothe him through his nightmares or sees him struggle for breath after three minutes of weeding his garden. Other days, when the sun is seen for a rare, brief moment to warm their skin, when they sit at the table and the brothers entertain Castiel by bouncing shared stories off each other’s words or when the simple pleasure of a soft summer breeze makes Sam smile, he forgets, and finds himself sad for all three of them and the loss that is waiting.

This year, Sam’s garden has to wait. It’s a long time before he is strong enough to work in it, but he’s nothing if not stubborn. Castiel leaves for a supply run one day, leaving him sick but calm and relaxed in his bed, the door open to allow view on Dean fixing the stable, and when he comes back two days later, Dean is gone to fish in the river on the far side of the cave and Sam is lying in the gab between his vegetables and the side of the house, giving his friend a scare when he finds him.

But Sam is awake, if dizzy, when Castiel helps him up and drags him back inside. After he’s been settled on the bed and given some water to drink, he even smiles, and says, “The strawberries have survived the winter.”

Castiel shakes his head with fond exasperation. Dean is nowhere to be seen, which means Sam left the house after his brother was out of sight, well aware Dean would not approve. He has been restless for days, fed up with staying in bed, and Castiel isn’t surprised he escaped when the first opportunity presented itself.

Dean and Castiel are doing their best to protect him and keep him safe, but they both also understand how frustrating it is for Sam to constantly be told what he is not up to doing.

Now, even flat on the bed and fighting spells of dizziness after overexerting himself, Sam looks triumphant, once again finding joy in something so simple. He has found the wild strawberries at the edge of the forest last fall and hoped he could settle them in his garden. Dean had welcomed the idea of the sweet fruits with a gleam in his eyes and they have all been curious to see if they would grow and bear fruit.

Castiel decides not to tell Dean that Sam strayed from the house while he was gone. Half an hour later, after Sam has recovered some of his strength, he helps him out again and together they sit in the garden and pull weed from the dry earth.

 

-

 

The colour of they sky has changed. Where is used to be a dirty orange bordering on brown before, it is now more yellow than orange, like the sun shining through a thin layer of clouds as it rises. The change happened gradually, so slowly that at first the brothers don’t notice. Castiel was aware all the time, noting every degree by which the sky had brightened, and it never occurred to him that Dean and Sam would miss it – like the slow aging of a face, or the growing of hair – until one day Dean looked up to the sky, narrowed his eyes against the brightness, and said, “Huh.”

There’s still dust in the sky. It seems darker now before the brighter backdrop, drifting in black strands before the layer of clouds like phantom snakes, or mingling with the clouds to form spectacular shapes. There is beauty in it that Castiel has not noticed before although he thinks it must always have been there. Perhaps he can now see it because it is no longer forever.

Every now and then the veil opens, allowing the blue of the real sky to be seen. It is Sam who points out, during a long moment in which they all stare up to the deep purple of an evening sky about to disappear, that the three of them are the only people left on earth who have seen it before.

While the clouds break open more and more frequently, it’s still something rare and wonderful. It happens more often in spring and fall than it does in summer and winter, but when it does happen in summer, the temperature rises enough, for a few minutes, to make them break into a sweat when a now unfamiliar ray of sun hits their skin.

Eventually, the sun will be back to the world for good and then people are going to get sunburned because they aren’t used to it. Heat strokes might happen. Sam writes an article on the risks and has Castiel deliver it to the village with his next trip. The villagers laugh at him in good humour when he hands it over. They will have to learn for themselves.

This summer is the brightest they have had in two hundred years; Castiel is convinced that at this rate the veil of clouds will be too thin to withstand the power of the sun in another two years, and already the plants in the meadow and the forest and the garden are adapting. They are good at adapting. The ones that survived to be still around are the ones who managed to adapt to an existence with little light and they will be able to handle its return.

They were losses, though. Many trees in the forest died in the first winter, more in the second one, but the ones left can handle the changing seasons. Sam’s garden suffers every year, but he just keeps replacing the plants that died and hopes they will make it this time. More often than not, they do.

Now the vegetables suffer more from Sam’s poor health and the resulting absences than the weather. Dean and Castiel still don’t take care of the garden, not really, even though it makes Sam do unwise things like getting out of bed when he shouldn’t, because things need to be cut or moved or watered. It seems wrong, somehow, to get involved. This is Sam’s thing to do. All the other two do is help with the weeding and dig out the potatoes or carrots so the results of Sam’s hard work won’t rot in the earth.

Lately, it’s been raining all the time, so the watering hasn’t been a problem. There was little to be done while the water poured down from the sky and Castiel was glad, because Sam has never recovered from his grave illness last winter and has felt miserable for days. Not as bad as he has been, not by far, but he’s been weak and feverish, and the rattling sound in his lungs seems to get wore every day, even though he hasn’t coughed blood for weeks. (Not that they are aware of, anyway. Sometimes it happens, and Sam manages to wipe the blood off before they notice, and days later they find the spots on the bed sheets.) Dean has been sitting with him a lot, gently teasing him even as he wipes his face with a cool cloth, and Castiel has taken care of the animals, and cooked and cleaned the house and read, and generally given them some space.

Days of rain are followed by a climb in temperature that dries out the ground quickly and for the first time this year allows them to go outside in short sleeves. Sam’s fever passes and he’s more aware, though still too weak to walk on his own. On the third day without rain, Castiel returns from cleaning the stables their cows have been stuck in for days to see Dean carry his brother outside in his arms, towards the lone tree at the base of the first hill.

Sam is pale, his head resting heavily on Dean’s shoulder, but he smiles weakly when he sees Castiel and says something too quiet to make out over this distance. It makes Dean snort softly and say something in return as he kneels down on a blanket spread beneath the tree and carefully lowers his younger brother to the ground.

It’s a bright day, bright enough for weak shadows to be cast even though the sun is nowhere to be seen. Castiel knows, though, that Dean chose the spot underneath the tree less for the shadow and more to protect both their eyes from the yellow glare of the sky that can be painful if stared at too long. That, and because they all like the spot. They sat underneath the tree often.

After settling his brother, Dean settles beside him, Sam’s head resting against his chest. Castiel frowns – because Sam has to be pretty weak if he needs his brother to move him around like that, but also because he and Dean had planned to fix a hole in the roof today. (Since they never use the second storey the hole is not much of a problem, but it will become one if they just leave it be.) By the look of it, Dean doesn’t plan on getting up anytime soon.

With a sigh, Castiel steps into the house through the door that leads directly into Sam’s bedroom. The sheets are crumbled and the room smells ever so faintly of illness, so he keeps the door open and changes the bedding to make it as comfortable as possible for his ailing friend. Looking out, he finds both brothers motionless underneath the tree, obviously asleep. For lack of anything else to do, Castiel sits down to read and edit Sam’s latest journal, since he can’t fix the roof on his own.

The article Sam has been working on was written with the help of Dean, explaining the construction and workings of simple engines. “So they won’t have to start from scratch,” Sam had explained, “provided they ever find gas,” and Castiel had refrained from pointing out that that might never happen. And that there are books that explain it better. There’s no guarantee those books still exist, anyway.

He loses himself in the work for some time, and when he leaves the house an hour later, Dean and Sam are still lying underneath the tree. So much for getting Dean’s help.

It never occurs to Castiel to go over there and wake his friend, reminding him of their plans. Instead, he reschedules and turns to the garden, carefully wandering between the plants that are standing in neat rows. A few of the vegetables need to be harvested in the next few days. Kneeling by the five small strawberry plants at the far end, he turns over the dark green leaves and finds fruits underneath, some of them already deep red. In the days of rain, they ripened without anyone noticing.

The rustling of the high grass in the still air alerts him of Dean’s presence even before his friend says, “Find anything good?”

“The strawberries are ripe.” Castiel turns just in time to see Dean’s face lit up. Within seconds he’s kneeling beside Castiel and carefully plugging a red one off the plant.

“I need to check they’re not poisoned,” he explains before bushing off the earth and showing it in his mouth. It’s small, but it’s the first strawberry he’s eaten in years. For a long second he closes his eyes, then he says, “A little less sweet than I remember, but Sam’s gonna love them.”

He’s right. Sam has a hard time eating _anything_ lately, but he might try with the strawberries – and if nothing else, he will be happy that they are growing in his garden, and that Dean loves them.

“We wanted to fix the roof,” Castiel reminds his friend.

“Hm, yeah. Sorry. Sam wanted to be outside, and I guess I drifted off when he did.” Dean checks the sky, estimating how much daylight they have left, but it’s barely past midday, and twenty minutes later they are on the roof, Castiel holding the planks in place while Dean hammers in the nails. On the ground, their two cows, whom Dean has named Cow One and Other Cow, are lying in the grass, their jaws moving lazily, and in the shadow of the tree Sam is lying where Dean left him, still asleep. From this distance, he looks peaceful. He looks okay.

They keep one eye on him always, because anything could happen out there, even this close to the house, and Sam is helpless.

After they fix the hole that allowed the rain to form unwanted puddles of water in an unused upstairs bedroom unless hindered with the use of strategically placed buckets, they check the rest of the roof and find two more places that are about the break in. By the time they are done, Castiel is thirsty and ready for a break, so he goes to the kitchen for a glass of water while Dean goes to check on his brother and take him back to the house. It will get dark soon.

Castiel watches from the open kitchen door as his friend makes his way towards the tree, his mind going through his planning for the rest of the day. Getting the cows back into the stable. Collect some strawberries from the garden. Make dinner.

One of them will have to hunt next week, or they will run out of meat. Rabbit would be nice.

Sam hasn’t moved at all since Dean left him hours ago. Not once.

Castiel watches, his glass in his hand, as Dean gently shakes his brother’s shoulder, then shakes him again, with more force yet still carefully, like Sam might break. He watches as Dean falls just as still as his brother for an all too short moment before cupping Sam’s face with a frantic gesture, stroking his hair and finally letting his fingers rest on his neck.

There is stillness again. For a long while the two brothers seem to be frozen in time.

Then Dean nods, once, a shaky, jerky movement. From the house, Castiel can see his shoulders rise as he draws in air and nods again, over and over, his whole torso following the movement. He gathers his brother’s limp body in his arms, holds him against his chest.

Castiel places his glass on the table, very softly. He had thought he knew how this would feel.

When he reaches the tree, Dean is still rocking Sam’s body back and forth. He’s crying, but his eyes are clear and staring at something far away. “It’s okay, Sammy,” he says over and over again, his voice stable and soft. “It’s okay. It’s okay.”

 

-

 

They burn Sam’s body at dawn, after spending all night building the pyre. Due to the recent drought, the pile of wood burns easily, the smoke making their eyes burn. When the flames start to lick at the blanket they wrapped Sam in, Castiel looks over at Sam’s brother and finds his gaze focused on the deep red line that is slowly spreading over the horizon. “Think he’s waiting for me?” Dean asks without looking at his friend.

“He promised, didn’t he?”

Dean nods. “But what if Gabriel just dragged him away?”

“Then you’ll find him again. You always do.”

Dean’s lips twitch, barely notable. It’s very far from being a smile, but it’s something in the right direction. His eyes wander to the fire and Castiel knows what he’s thinking, what he’s going to do, and he takes hold of Dean’s arm to stop him.

Dean turns towards him, glaring, suddenly suspicious, but Castiel only shakes his head and says, “Not like that.”

Under Dean’s wary eyes he pulls a gun out of his waistband. He collected the weapon from the house while Dean was stacking up the wood they originally intended to burn in the fireplace and now he presents it to his friend as the last gift he will ever make him.

Dean looks at it, and then at Castiel, with gratitude and wary tension before finally he relaxes, standing with his back to the fire that will soon consume his body along with his brother’s. “Are you sure you can’t come with us?”

The question is unexpected and touching, and it makes Castiel smile even as he shakes his head. “I have things left to do. Names to learn. I think it’s time to go on another journey, and see what’s becoming of this world.” He’s already been thinking about it. There are things to be done on the farm, even if it will be abandoned. The cows can’t be left to fend for themselves. There are journals of Sam’s to finish and hand to the people he wanted them to have. He needs to decide what to pack and what to leave behind. “Maybe I’ll collect some strawberries for the road.”

Dean smiles after all, in the end, albeit briefly. He nods his acceptance and closes his eyes and Castiel puts the gun to his forehead and pulls the trigger.

Afterwards, he steps away from the heat of the fire and sits down underneath the tree with his fingers in the grass and his eyes on the horizon, to watch the sun come up.

 

End

 

August 6th, 2012


End file.
